My former student, Jeff Cook, who is currently serving as a postgraduate legal fellow with International Justice Mission in Phnom Penh, has a humorous post about litigation in Cambodia. Here is what Cook says is the common practice for witnesses swearing to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth": It didn't take long for me to...
For critics of universal jurisdiction, Spain's UJ statute has become the poster child for accusations of excess. How strange it seems that roughly ten years ago it was so widely celebrated as the provision that brought down General Augusto Pinochet. Spain's indicting the former Chilean dictator and Britain's detaining him on the attendant arrest warrant and extradition request...
A couple of weeks ago, Sweden did something unprecedented for an EU nation -- it indicated it would proceed with the extradition of an accused Rwandan génocidaire to Kigali. Sylvere Ahorugeze, a 53-year-old former director of Rwanda's civil aviation authority, is implicated in the 1994 murder of a group of civilians in the Kigali suburb of Gikondo. He...
John Bellinger, who served as the Bush administration Legal Advisor to the State Department (in which capacity he famously guest blogged at Opinio Juris!), has an op-ed in today's last Saturday's NY Times calling for legislation to override the Supreme Court's decision in Medellin v. Texas and to give effect to the ICJ's 2003 decision in Avena. The legislation...
According to a national poll conducted by Time, now that Walter Cronkite is dead, John Stewart is America's most trusted newscaster. Stewart, 44%. Brian Williams, 29%. Charlie Gibson, 19%. Katie Couric: 7%. (I guess I shouldn't mock. If those were the choices, I'd have voted for him, too.)...
You probably know which blogs have the most traffic from Paul Caron’s “Law Prof Blog Rankings.” But I bet you have no idea which law blogs are the best read, that is, the ones that have “sticky” readership. If you take Paul Caron’s Top Law Prof Blog rankings and rank the blogs based on the “average visit length”...
Related to my post yesterday about the presence requirement for invoking universal jurisdiction (with respect to the UK's new genocide law amendment), QC Ken Macdonald (visiting professor at the London School of Economics) has proposed in The Times an interesting possible solution to deal with what I would call the "Colin Powell" (or, per Macdonald, "Henry Kissinger") dilemma: Of course a...
Considering Sonia Sotomayor's testimony last week from an international law perspective, much seems to have been made about her April speech to the Puerto Rican Chapter of the ACLU. In that speech, she did opine that "ideas have no boundaries," and that "international law and foreign law will be very important in the discussion of how to think about...
My thanks to Deb for her post on the Preliminary Report. I won't rehash what she said; I just wanted to offer a few thoughts on the military commissions and the detention policy. First, I think it is interesting that the Obama administration seems to be conceding that "material support for terrorism" is not a violation of the laws of...
It has been a fascinating two weeks blogging here, and I certainly learned a lot. Some outstanding questions I haven't answered, but unfortunately tomorrow I must turn from these duties to more tedious legal tasks -- jury duty. Thank you the OpinioJurists for having me....
Lite-blogging Ken notes the front page WSJ story today, "Swiss Banks Freeze Out US Clients," July 21, 2009. The freeze-out is a response to UBS and its fight with the IRS, which wants information on US taxpayers (not necessarily just citizens). I have two questions, neither of which I will try to answer: First, what is the competitive advantage of a...
As Ken noted, it was my birthday when I started my blogging stint here, and as I wind down my stint here, I''ll observe another birthday. In a few weeks it will be the first anniversary of the Russo-Georgian war, which saw Russia conquere Georgian territory and cement its control on those parts of Georgia it already occupied. I trust...
