Opinio Juris is pleased to bring (almost live) blogging from the UN Human Rights Council session that opens today in Geneva. Our guest blogger is Elizabeth Kandravy Cassidy of UN Watch. Elizabeth is an American-trained lawyer whose prior experience includes teaching law in Africa and the United States. Prior to joining UN Watch, Elizabeth did a bit of...
The NYT has a depressing but somewhat predictable piece today pummelling the new U.N. Human Rights Council. As the article notes, the new Council has focused almost exclusively on condemning Israel while turning a blind eye to any other potential human rights violator. This debate is getting old. Rather than whining about the U.N., etc., a more interesting question whether...
What is the value in considering a body of work as a part of a new “school” of legal thought? Panelists Robert Ahdieh, Rosa Brooks, Ryan Goodman, and Derek Jinks were asked by moderators Laura Dickinson and Oona Hathaway to provide their perspectives on this question and to offer their opinions on the pros and cons of identifying their...
The third panel of the Young Scholars Conference presented student scholarship that applies the lessons of the New Haven School to current international legal problems. The student presenters offered empirical analyses of contemporary phenomena ranging from Geneva Convention compliance to the WTO Dispute Resolution Mechanism, with responses from moderators Paul Dubinsky, Noah Novogrodsky and Beth Van Schaack. Within...
The second panel of the Yale Young Scholars Conference gave four professors the opportunity to share their reflections on the New Haven School and its application to a range of international legal problems. REBECCA BRATSPIES Rebecca Bratspies of the City University of New York presented her paper, Rethinking Decisionmaking in International Environmental Law: A Process-Oriented Approach to Sustainable Development. Bratspies...
Seeking to examine historical perspectives on the New Haven School, the first panel of the Young Scholars Conference was a dialogue between two generations of international law scholars. In his opening remarks, moderator Michael Reisman cautioned scholars against consigning to history the set of tools employed in the New Haven School, finding a continued utility and intellectual value in...
During the 1790s, the Supreme Court decided numerous cases involving Article 17 of the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France. These cases all arose in the context of an ongoing naval war that pitted France against England and Spain. France commissioned several privateers to attack British and Spanish merchant ships. The French privateers brought captured...
As I pointed out last week, there was an odd disconnect between the International Court of Justice's finding that Serbia did not commit genocide against Bosnia and judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia finding responsibility for genocide at the highest levels of the Serbia/Yugoslavia government. The IWPR, which has great coverage of this issue, further...
As covered last week in Chris Borgen’s post titled, Conference on the "New" New Haven School, the Yale Journal of International Law (YJIL) is pleased to announce its fifth annual Young Scholars Conference, which will take place this Saturday, March 10, at YLS. The Conference's theme is "The 'New' New Haven School: International Law: Past, Present & Future." A generation...
The Tenth Circuit last week rendered a nice little opinion addressing the relationship between terrorism, free speech, and security zones at inter-governmental conferences. The gist of the argument in Citizens for Peace in Space v. City of Colorado Springs is that free speech rights diminish as government interests in security are heightened. Translation: protesters' rights are going...
In Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, the Supreme Court engaged in a practice that, sadly, is becoming increasingly common in cases where an individual litigant raises a claim or defense on the basis of a treaty. The Court ignored the relevant constitutional text. Despite the fact that the text of the Supremacy Clause explicitly addresses a central issue in the...
I just published at Huffington Post my last post on the UCLA nuclear threats conference entitled, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Preemptive Strikes. Here is an excerpt: [T]here were a few who did suggest the appropriateness of preemptive strikes. Berkeley political scientist Bob Powell said that defense and deterrence were synonymous and that the real question...
