March 2007

How happy is David Hicks today?A U.S. military tribunal sentenced Australian David Hicks Friday to seven years in prison but he will only have to serve nine months of the sentence. Hicks, who became the first war crimes convict among the hundreds of foreign captives held for years at the Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba, pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism in...

The UN Human Rights Council today concluded another session in which it failed to address the vast majority of human rights abuses occurring around the globe. It ignored such serious situations as repression in Burma and North Korea, denial of political rights in China, restrictions on women's rights in Saudi Arabia, and even the violent crackdown on opposition leaders in...

[Joost Pauwelyn is Professor of Law at Duke Law School and a discussant in the Opinio Juris On-line Symposium. He blogs regularly at the International Economic Law and Policy Blog] “Noncompliance is necessary to the effective functioning and the continued relevance of the international legal system”. That is Jacob Cogan’s main thesis. Applied to the United States – for...

[Jacob Cogan is Assitant Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati and a contributor to the Opinio Juris On-line Symposium] My thanks to Professor Joost Pauwelyn for his thoughtful comments, to Opinio Juris for inviting me to participate in this online symposium, and to the Yale Journal of International Law for publishing my essay on Noncompliance and the International Rule...

[Gregory Gordon is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of North Dakota Law School and a conbributor to the Opinio Juris On-Line Symposium] I think Professor Mark Drumbl’s perceptive comments highlight some of the serious tensions underlying the creation of an inclusive, internally coherent international due process that dispenses justice efficiently while upholding the human rights principles on which it...

[Mark Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law at Washington & Lee Law School and a discussant in the Opinio Juris On-line Symposium. He blogs regularly at AIDP Blog.] In Toward an International Criminal Procedure: Due Process Aspirations and Limitations, Professor Gregory Gordon inquires why international criminal procedure "has failed to achieve the level of due process offered...

[Sean Murphy is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School and a discussant in the Opinio Juris On-Line Symposium] For decades now, the global community has recognized that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their delivery systems constitutes a major threat to international peace and security. Since the attacks of 9/11, there is broad recognition that...

[Vik Kanwar is a JSD candidate at NYU, a Westerfield Fellow at Loyola New Orleans College of Law and a contributor to the Opinio Juris On-line Symposium] My sincere thanks to Professor Sean D. Murphy for his careful reading of my paper, for his clear exposition of the challenging context in which it is written, and for confirming in my mind...

[Andrew Guzman is Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, Boalt Hall and a discussant in the Opinio Juris On-line Symposium. He blogs regularly at the International Economic Law and Policy Blog] Eugene Kontorovich’s paper, Inefficient Customs in International Law is a welcome contribution to the growing analytical literature on customary international law (CIL). The question asked here is of...

[Eugene Kontorovich is a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University Law School and a contributor to the Opinio Juris On-line Symposium] I would like the thank Peggy and the rest of the Opinio Jurists for providing this forum for the discussion of new work. I’m grateful to Andrew Guzman for providing comments, and even more grateful for providing charitable ones. Andrew’s comments...

[John Knox is Professor of Law at Wake Forest University Law School and a discussant in the Opinio Juris Symposium] Hari’s paper describes the contributions law-and-geography and legal pluralism can make to understanding climate change litigation and, by extension, other important international problems. She contrasts this pluralist vision to a traditional view of international law, which is much more state-centric....