I understand that Opinio Juris will be hosting a discussion of Benjamin Wittes' new book, Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (Penguin 2008) when it is released for distribution on June 19. That is a very good thing to do. I have heard Ben present material from that book and...
Over at National Security Advisors, our colleague Dave Glazier has a superb post on whether the Gitmo defense attorneys are responsible for the ills of the military commissions, as the Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page seems to believe. Here's the intro:The Wall Street Journal published a scathing editorial today blasting the military and civilian defense attorneys it portrays...
The June 2008 issue of Esquire magazine has a feature piece on John Yoo by John H. Richardson, plus an on-line transcript of part of Richardson's interview and an autobiographical sketch by Yoo himself. Although framed as a cautionary tale, the article clearly seeks to humanize Yoo. The reader gets a view of Yoo the professor, questioning...
Many of us who work in the areas of laws of war and armed conflict have been watching the development of technology because, if history is any guide, changes in technology are a big, quite possibly the biggest, long-term, historical driver of changes in the laws of war. The development of the musket, cross-bow, airplane, machine gun, and so...
What happens if a mother wrongfully removes a child from his habitual residence because of fears that the child will be abused by his father? In such circumstances can the mother flee the country with the child consistent with the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (HCCAICA). Those are the questions raised by the...
Any American who has ever watched the British Commons debates on TV cannot help sighing in embarrassment and shame at the sheer inarticulateness of our American counterparts in the House and Senate. Wit and intelligence are not even at issue; successfully stringing together a subject and predicate, and to do so in less than a quarter hour, is. ...
They number at least 12,000,000, though a precise count is impossible because many governments refuse to consider them a legitimate category for census purposes. They suffer serious and widespread employment discrimination, especially their women, leading to unemployment rates often 6-8 times greater than the countries in which they live. They are sequestered in dangerous, environmentally-degraded slums,...
Russia continues to keep the pressure on Canada in the race to claim rights over the seabed underneath the Arctic Sea. THE battle for "ownership" of polar oil reserves has intensified with Russia sending a fleet of nuclear-powered ice-breakers into the Arctic. It has reinforced fears that Moscow intends to unlawfully annex a vast portion of the ice-covered...
Ken's already up on the boards below, but I just wanted to add our official welcome to him for the coming week as a guest blogger. I'm confident that Ken is known to most of you for his always engaging and provocative scholarship as well as his eclectic blogging on Law of War and Just War Theory Blog (where...
My dear friend and sometimes co-author, David Rieff, has an opinion piece in today's Los Angeles Times, evincing great skepticism about calls for outside military intervention to deliver aid in Burma. "Save Us From the Rescuers, LA Times Opinion, May 18, 2007. The piece is closely related to Kevin's post citing John Boonstra's concerns that the meaning of...
My thanks to everyone at Opinio Juris for inviting me to guest blog this week. I am a very big admirer of this blog and have been since its beginning - I admire its political balance, its civility, and the high intellectual standards it sets. Plus it's fun to read. I'll try to live up to those...
Having grown up on Green Lantern comics (and having one friend quip that she thinks that explains my becoming an international lawyer), I was nonetheless somewhat stunned to come across the following on Wagner James Au’s New World Notes blog, which covers the evolution of Second Life, the online “virtual world”:Second Life has a Darfur, so it’s sad (though...
