The Obama Administration is becoming famous for their Friday night news dumps (deficit reports are always on Fridays). So here is another one sure to anger some parts of their base, but which is carefully buried while everyone is watching the Yankees beat up on the Angels. The Obama administration has formulated a new policy for Sudan that proposes working with that country’s...
Wow! I know there has been some talk and some cases about an international right to internet access. But Finland has upped the ante by guaranteeing a right to high speed internet access. Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right, YLE, the country's national broadcasting company, reported on Wednesday. According to the report, every person...
It sure looks like it, according to Bloomberg. The Pentagon is reviewing the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive military strikes with an eye to modifying or possibly ending it. The international environment is “more complex” than when President George W. Bush announced the policy in 2002, Kathleen Hicks, the Defense Department’s deputy undersecretary for strategy, said in an interview. “We’d really like to...
For those of you working on anti-corruption papers, the following symposium might be just the place for you (Deadline November 1, 2009). ...
Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith have a nice piece in Green Bag on foreign sovereign immunity as applied to current and former government officials. The article tees up the issues that will be presented in Samantar v. Yousef. Here is a key part of their argument: We agree with those courts that have concluded that suits against individual foreign...
Harvard Law School is hosting in a couple of week what is certain to be a very interesting small conference on the Alien Tort Statute. I was lucky enough to be one of the invitees, addressing the issue of corporate liability under the ATS. I address the issue of corporate liability under the ATS, but am actually interested in it...
I've wanted to mention for a while that international law scholars might want to keep in mind the surprisingly large number of English language international journals that publish outside the United States or English-speaking countries such as those places where KJH hangs out. It's been on my mind as I have a piece coming out later on this year from...
Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School (and occasional Opinio Juris guest-blogger) has sent in the following call for questions/ topics for a roundtable at International Law Weekend entitled Overlapping Threats / Overlapping Jurisdictions: International Law in the Face of New Threats to Peace and Security. She writes: Climate change, swine flu, the global financial crisis, and drug trafficking pose significant...
The Washington Post reports that a prominent Democratic fundraiser and close ally of Senator John Kerry (chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) is seeking to be permitted to lobby on behalf of the current Sudanese government. This may seem a little weird, and even morally distasteful, but it is another logical consequence of the engagement strategy. As the hopeful...
I'm pleased to note that Glenn Reynolds and I have a new short opinion piece up at Forbes.com, Bombing the Moon. It takes the hook of the LCROSS mission last week to shift gears from explosions on the Moon to ...
I had the good fortune to be invited to lecture to Jack Goldsmith's class on Cyberwar and Cybercrime at Harvard Law School last week to discuss my arguments for why we need new international law rules for cyberconflicts. While there, a student flagged for me a new journal--the Harvard National Security Journal--that's literally and figuratively coming on-line right now. Here's how their web-page...
Charli Carpenter has an interesting short commentary over at RFE/RFL discussing the recently released fact-finding report on the Georgia-Russia war. I have not had a chance to read the report, so I won't comment myself (I said something about my experiences as a human rights monitor of the early 1990s phase of the civil war, and then followed up with...
