In association with the International Commission of Jurists

December 2009

17 Dec

I want to interrupt our Copenhagen focus to briefly flag a conversation that's on-going over at EJIL: Talk!  My Temple Law colleague, Jeff Dunoff, along with Joel Trachtman (The Fletcher School) recently put out a new work--Ruling the World? Constitutionalism, International Law and Global Governance (Cambridge, 2009), which is the focus of EJIL's latest on-line symposium.  Here's a description of the book project in brief: Ruling...

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17 Dec

The one thing that has become abundantly clear this week at Copenhagen is that there is very distinct lack of trust between developed and developing countries. This came to a head on Monday with the walkout of some of the G77 countries as they believed that developed countries were attempting to scrap the Kyoto Protocol. A critical element in building trust...

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17 Dec

[Professor Dan Bodansky is continuing his dispatches from the climate change talks.  This post is cross-posted at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford.] Copenhagen, December 17 – With the hours counting down to the end of the Copenhagen conference, real substantive negotiations have yet to begin. Instead, the focus has been almost exclusively on procedure. All...

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16 Dec

The Copenhagen process is multilateral, focused on reaching global agreements. But to get to a strong and truly effective global climate regime, bold bilateral initiatives may be needed. The conditions are propitious for a deal between China and the US, the world’s largest and second largest emitters, but that will call for imaginative and committed leadership on both sides as...

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15 Dec

One gets a new perspective on climate negotiations when your toes are about to fall off! It took me 8.5 hours of standing in sub-zero temperatures to get registered at the Bella Centre (and this is after I was only about fiftieth in line, showing up at 6.45am). There were thousands of people behind me when I last looked back....

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15 Dec

Monday, December 14 – The climate negotiations ground to a halt for much of today, as negotiators debated the organization of work for the second and final week of the meeting. The ostensible cause of the breakdown was concern among (some?) developing countries that the Kyoto Protocol (KP) track in the negotiations is moving more slowly, and getting less...

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14 Dec

For too many years American climate change debates were political contests in which scientific evidence took a back seat to political posturing, obfuscation, and ultimately, inaction. Today, the science demonstrating that our world is warming and that humans are a primary cause of this warming is unambiguous. Though there remain a few public voices willing to deny the...

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14 Dec

Here in Copenhagen, agreeing on some principles of climate finance, at least in very basic form, is at last becoming a priority. Last week, after announcing EU money for a climate change fast start fund, German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that developing countries would only enter into a climate agreement if sufficient money was committed by developed countries: “This is...

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13 Dec

One of my favorite issues of the New York Times Magazine is its "year in ideas" issue, which comes annually in December.  Because OJ is a repository of things related to battlefield robotics and law and ethics, I wanted to flag for your attention the item by Dara Kerr, "Guilty Robots." [I]magine robots that obey injunctions like Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative...

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11 Dec

President Obama's Nobel Prize speech yesterday made reference to the moral authority, under the ethics of the just war, for armed humanitarian intervention in some situations.  It is a topic that has been debated and discussed as a matter of international law for, well, a long time, but which gained particular urgency following on Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo in the...

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