The discovery of underseas treasure a few weeks ago would have made a great movie, or at least a Discovery Channel documentary. But, inevitably, the story has moved into the real world and that means: litigation. The government of Spain filed a lawsuit yesterday in U.S. federal court in Florida seeking to assert its ownership rights over the...
In case anyone is interested, I have posted to SSRN an essay that is part of a written symposium in honor of Father Robert Drinan and his book Can God and Caesar Coexist? The symposium also includes essays by professors Elizabeth Defeis and Mark Janis, as well as a responsive essay by Father Drinan, one of his last published pieces....
The U.N. Security Council has narrowly approved the creation of an international criminal tribunal to investigate the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. According to the BBC, Lebanon has until June 10 to ratify the tribunal. If there is no ratification by Lebanon, the the tribunal will be created. I have to say I haven't been following...
Well, not much, but even though we don’t often utter the word “law” in the same sentence as “World Bank President,” doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t. Especially during a transition in leadership. The World Bank affects the rule of law through its governance initiatives at the domestic level and the web of borrower agreements at the international level. Clinton-era Bank President...
The Ninth Circuit recently issued an opinion in United States v. Smiskin interpreting a treaty with a certain Indian tribe that included an unusual reference to rules of treaty interpretation. The case involved a potential conflict between a treaty right and a statutory prohibition on transporting "unstamped cigarettes" (i.e., untaxed cigarettes). The Yakama Treaty of 1855 guarantees the following...
I've just finished reading Tom Bowers' fascinating — and disturbing — book on the failures of denazification after WWII, Blind Eye to Murder. In the final chapter, Bowers discusses the 1977 kidnapping and eventual murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the wealthy president of the Federation of German Employers and a former SS officer, by the Red Army Faction (RAF). ...
International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers. Not exactly Memorial Day -- not yet, at least. Today, cultural sites; tomorrow, our federal holidays. Can the black helicopters and global income taxes be far behind? For those of you who want to start your vacation planning, here's the new calendar. ...
The World Bank has a wonderful website called Doing Business that tracks the ease of doing business throughout the world. There is a tremendous amount of useful information that is worth perusing. For example, the top ten easiest places to do business in the world are Singapore, New Zealand, United States, Canada, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Denmark,...
We’re regularly plugging international law conferences here at Opinio Juris. Most of them, however, are in the United States. So, for a change of pace, I want to call attention to any of our readers in Israel of a conference there next week, entitled “Forty Years after 1967: Reappraising the Role and Limits of Legal Discourse on...
Here is the Amazon pre-order page for "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration," due out in September. According to the publicity material, the book promises to "show why Bush's apparent indifference to human rights has damaged his presidency and, perhaps, his standing in history." Is sovereigntism losing another of its leading exponents? This...
Last week, I discussed the disturbing case of Francois Xavier-Byuma, a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group who had been arrested and accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide. As I noted in that post, the accusations were leveled by a gacaca judge whom Byuma had been investigating in connection with the rape of a young girl. The situation...
The United Nations announced last week that the government of Burundi has agreed to establish a criminal tribunal and truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) to deal with the widespread war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide committed during Burundi's 12-year civil war, in which more than 300,000 people were killed:Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights,...
