The announcement of a successful test of a nuclear weapon by North Korea (update: articles by NYT, WaPo, Guardian, and the text of the North Korean announcement) raises the question: did such a test render North Korea in violation of international law? As is often the case, the briefest questions can be the most challenging to answer convincingly. ...
Professor David Sloss of Saint Louis University has provided this commentary on the Military Commissions Act. David has published widely in the area of foreign relations law. We are pleased to welcome his comments here: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 contains a number of provisions that raise intriguing constitutional and statutory interpretation questions. This comment will focus on...
Here is the mock trial problem of People v. Campbell about schoolyard terrorism: People v. Campbell is the trial of Casey Campbell, a senior at Park Lane High School. Casey is alleged to have placed a bomb in a trash can near the school’s cafeteria. The defendant is charged with placing a bomb on school grounds, attempting to explode a device...
The Associated Press has just reported a North Korean announcement that the country successfully performed its first test of a nuclear weapon yesterday evening EDT. Neither the United States, South Korea, nor Japan have officially confirmed that the test did indeed occur. However, statements by South Korean intelligence officials and an official South Korean seismic monitoring center that...
The Pew Research Center did an interesting poll last week that underscored the importance of international issues for the mid-term elections. The poll revealed that 51% of voters say "national issues" matter more than local concerns in their vote for Congress. Just 23% say local issues will be more important than national issues to their vote. And...
The Boston Globe is running a multi-part story on how the Bush Administration is channeling increasing amounts of foreign aid through faith-based organizations, allegedly breaching the church-state divide in the process. However the constitutional doctrine applies (with the wild card of extraterritoriality), one can find an obvious silver lining here: creating a core Republican constituency for foreign assistance. That’s...
The story here, without many details. (HT: Orin Kerr at VC.) This adds Harvard to Michigan and Hofstra as schools that require IL in the first year, but Harvard's move obviously increases the probability of a cascade (look at what's happened in the wake of Harvard College's decision on early admissions). Several others schools include IL-related courses...
I recently posted to SSRN my forthcoming article, "Medellin, Norm Portals, and the Horizontal Integration of International Human Rights," which will be published later this year by the Notre Dame Law Review. As always, I welcome any comments (either on line or via email). Here's the abstract: The Medellin v. Dretke line of capital cases challenging U.S. non-compliance with...
Larry Solum has kicked off an interesting exchange on interdisciplinary ignorance among legal academics. My question: how do international law scholars line up against their peers on this measure? My hunch is that IL scholars are more likely to have some interdisciplinary grounding than lawprofs in other fields, for two reasons. First, there was the payoff of...
Today, Seton Hall Law School is hosting a Guantanomo “Teach-In.” Here’s how the steering committee co-chairs, Mark Denbeaux and Alan Sussman describe the event: With more than 200 schools in at least 44 states already participating, "Guantánamo: How Should We Respond?” is an unprecedented collaborative effort of academia, journalism, religion, medicine and even the military in exploring the...
Lost amidst the blizzard of legislation and memorandum (and congressional teenage sex scandals) is this presidential declaration of policy against "destructive fisheries practices." Bush has placed the administration behind an Australian-led effort at the U.N. General Assembly to ban "bottom fishing" via trawlers, thought to cause serious environmental damage (see the Wapo article here). The General Assembly is...
In case you missed it, the Supreme Court is now offering same-day transcripts of oral arguments. The first example came in the immigration case of Lopez v. Gonzalez. Don't miss the end of the transcript where there is an extremely useful index. If you want to see whether the oral argument in this statutory construction case addressed...
