10 Sep Welcome to Guest Blogger John McGinnis
Opinio Juris is very pleased to welcome Professor John McGinnis of Northwestern University School of Law as a guest-blogger for the next few days. Professor McGinnis is a well-known scholar of constitutional and international law. Among his recent publications is this Stanford Law Review (with Ilya Somin) article examining the democratic legitimacy of international lawmaking. In addition to his academic appointment, Professor McGinnis has been appointed to the roster of Americans who can be appointed as panelists to resolve World Trade Organization disputes. Prior to entering the legal academy, Professor McGinnis served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice from 1987-1991.
Welcome to the blogosphere, John!
I am really glad of having another valuable legal sources, which would serve my academic and work ambitions.
Arguments seem pretty weak in that paper. For example, the fact that citizens don’t know IL doesn’t mean it’s not transparent. What kind of silly criterion is that?
Transparency is a metric achieved through comprehensive contemporaneous reporting, a developed corpus of principles and ratios, and review by knowledgable publicists and gatekeepers. Transparency is about accessibility in the first order, not knowledge, which is a second order effect of having transparency. It’s like saying the fact Americans have dismal knowledge of world geography means that the geographic layout of the world is somehow opaque and mysterious.
Sorry but that’s useless. It already assumes the premise that black letter domestic law is inherently better.