Today it was announced that Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One cannot fully understand the reason for any Nobel peace award until December 10 (Nobel’s birthday), when the Laureate makes an acceptance speech and the head of the Nobel Committee explains their thinking in conferring the award. The official announcement alludes to the new...
This video from Anne Bayefsky of the Human Rights Council meetings on the Goldstone Report is fascinating (though I am not on board with her over-the-top attack on Goldstone personally). But note the indiscriminate and deeply hypocritical use of the words "genocide," "war crimes," and "crimes against humanity" by the least morally attractive member states of the HRC (How...
I've posted lots here about targeted killing, and written about it for publication, as well. I'll be on NPR's All Things Considered today, in a story by correspondent Ari Shapiro, talking about targeted killings in relation to detention and interrogation. (Now that I've seen the story, I see with pleasure that it also quotes Matthew Waxman, Vijay Padmanabhan, John Bellinger,...
While I agree with Julian that the interplay of law and politics on questions of statehood can lead to difficult questions, I think his declaration that “we still don’t know when a state is a state,” does more to obscure the issues than actually give a clear picture as to how law and politics affect each other. First of all,...
Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute suggests that the U.S. is endorsing a less than robust view of the right to free expression in a recent Human Rights Council resolution sponsored by the U.S. (along with Egypt). The resolution does appear to give an unusual amount of lip service to the combatting racism and discrimination (given its topic), but it...
Are the two breakaway sections of Georgia (South Ossetia & Abhkazia) states? If not, why is Kosovo a state? The difficulty international lawyers have in answering these questions suggests that the most basic and fundamental questions of international law remain unresolved and deeply contested. What are the requirements for statehood? There are some generally accepted criteria, under international law, but they...
Assuming that the other Circuits follow suit, Roger is almost certainly right that the Second Circuit's recent decision in Talisman Energy "will be the death knell for most corporate liability claims under the Alien Tort Statute." That's regrettable in itself. What's particularly regrettable, though, is that the Second Circuit still has no idea what it's talking about when it comes...
With the Supreme Court term now underway, here is a summary of the most important cases that relate to international law. A few of the cases address fairly technical issues of statutory and treaty interpretation, while others have the potential to be quite significant for our discipline. I have organized the cases according to my sense of most...
The following was sent to us by the American Branch of the International Law Association: The American Branch of the International Law Association will hold its annual International Law Weekend, in conjunction with its 88th Annual Meeting, in New York from October 22-24, 2009. Registration is free for students, members of the American Branch, and cosponsoring organizations (including the ABA Section...
Here's a follow-up to Julian's question about the World Bank - what's the future role of the IMF? Interesting news story in the WSJ over the weekend on whether the IMF might become, as its chief would like, a quasi-central bank to the world - or instead, as the article suggests is the tenor of the G 20 meetings, a...
Via Instapundit, I notice that the World Bank is facing capital shortfalls that could put out of "business" in twelve months. “By the middle of next year we will face serious constraints,” said its president Robert Zoellick, as he launched a major campaign to persuade rich nations to pour more money into the Washington-based institution. He conceded that such a task was...
In the inaugural issue of the Yale Law Journal Online, the new online companion to the Yale Law Journal, Peggy McGuinness, Peter Spiro, Robert Ahdieh and I respond to Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen's recent article: "The Constitutional Power to Interpret International Law." All of us are critical, although in different ways. I am the most sympathetic to Paulsen, but...
