The WSJ has a very important (and certain to be much debated) story today on the front page, "A Global Surge in Tiny Loans Spurs Credit Bubble in a Slum," WSJ, A1, Thursday August 13, 2009. Also see the follow on stories, "Group borrowing leads to pressure," which is about the problem that when you use 'peer pressure' rather than...
I spent last week on a beach in Florida (because everyone from Philly vacations in Florida in August). I had left all my work at home, and was settling into a crime novel, David Hewson's The Sacred Cut, about a serial killer loose in my favorite city--Rome. It was a light read, so I was willing to go along with...
The ever useful and interesting Crimes of War Project website has posted a useful background web article on the debate in the General Assembly over the scope and status of 'responsibility to protect' (R2P). I've blogged at OJ about this before, citing to an Economist article summarizing the debate and some other things. The COW report, by Katherine Iliopoulos, can...
I know how much our readers like pirates, so I thought I would share the State of Victoria's remarkably loony criminal statutes on the subject. Here is s70B of the Crimes Act 1958: A person commits a piratical act if...
In case this is of interest to Opinio Juris readers, I want to point out that I have a new essay posted to SSRN entitled Hearts and Minds and Laws: Legal Compliance and Diplomatic Persuasion. Here's the abstract: This essay, written for the South Texas Law Review’s Ethics Symposium, considers the role of international legal argument in the war on terror...
I am blogger-lite this week, with apologies to all, but ...
Last week I wrote a post suggesting that the federal "cash for clunkers" program did not violate the WTO subsidies program because it did not have the de facto or de jure effect of discriminating against foreign imports. But what about the broader Obama stimulus program? Does that pass WTO muster? This article from Bloomberg published last week...
Although this is pretty far from my usual focus, I've been interested to see the August D.C. doldrums filled in part with an interesting emerging discussion of what happens next with the U.S. and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her "great regret" in Kenya last week that the United States hadn't yet ratified the...
I have been meaning to post about Melbourne Law School, my new academic home. I imagine many of our readers will be familiar with our remarkable contingent of international law faculty: James Hathaway (our Dean), Gerry Simpson, Anne Orford, Diane Otto, Tim McCormack, and more than a dozen others. What readers might not know is that Melbourne is in the...
Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban commander who orchestrated, among many other things, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and many other atrocities, is dead. The initial, somewhat confused reports expressed some doubts, but experts are gradually concluding that a US Predator missile strike killed him. At the strategic level, this is one area in which the US is having success. One can find...
There has been a very interesting -- and potentially very troubling -- development in the Lubanga trial. In response to a submission by representatives for the victims and over a strong dissent by Judge Fulford, the majority of Trial Chamber I has given notice to the parties and participants in the trial "that the legal characterisation of the facts may...
Last month the Eleventh Circuit in Valencia-Trujillo v. United States rendered an unusual decision that required the court to decide whether a state was acting "pursuant" to a treaty. If it was, the defendant had standing to pursue the action. If it was not, then he had no such standing. In extradition jurisprudence, the so-called “specialty rule” provides that...
