I just learned the sad news of the passing of Professor John Barton of my alma mater, Stanford Law School. The Stanford Law press release can be found here. John was a dedicated and learned scholar, a wonderful mentor and a delightful man to be around. He will be greatly missed. I was fortunate to get to know John during my first year...
Eugene Volokh has this post on the merits of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. He's against it. Volokh highlights several operative provisions that he finds objectionable on policy grounds, and argues that we shouldn't sign on to treaties that we don't intend to comply with. What's striking about the post is the exceptionalist premise that US isolation...
Marc Ambinder over at the Atlantic has posted his interview with Professor Glenn Sulmasy, whose new book The National Security Court System: A Natural Evolution of Justice in an Age of Terror has just been published by OUP. Ambinder summarizes the central arguments and proposals of Sulmasy's book: Sulmasy expands on what he calls a "hybrid" approach to the quandary of...
The government's new "cash for clunkers" program has been wildly successful. Under the program, consumers may receive up to $4,500 towards the purchase of a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle. What is surprising is the impact this it is having on consumer spending patterns regarding domestic vs. imported vehicles. According to press reports, more than 70% of the...
Deleuze once commented in a discussion with Foucault that "[a] theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or...
I want to thank the folks at OJ for having me over the past two weeks. You have all made me feel at home and I've enjoyed it very much. I've especially appreciated the opportunity to discuss legal issues stemming from upheaval in the African Great Lakes region. Some of these issues have been on my mind...
Until his arrest by the Rwandan military earlier this year, General Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi and former chairman of the Congolese Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), had been considered one of the key destabilizing figures in eastern Congo. Back in 2004, Nkunda and his rebel troops took control of the South Kivu town of Bukavu,...
Brad Roth, an old friend, and well known to many OJ readers as law and political science professor at Wayne State University, delivers a heck of a punch with his new paper, set to appear in Santa Clara Journal of International Law (2009), but up in draft at SSRN, "Coming to Terms with Ruthlessness: Sovereign Equality, Global Pluralism, and the Limits...
It's the colossal human catastrophe that just won't go away. And closing our eyes and wishing it were so is not going to work. There are new reports of fresh fighting, and widespread internal displacement and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to UNHCR, some 56,000 people have been forced to flee renewed armed conflict...
As part of his latest attack on Human Rights Watch, David Bernstein insists -- again -- that HRW "absolutely refuses to apologize or retract" when it is "wrong about Israel." He also claims that, "[t]hough challenged," I have "yet to come up with another, legitimate example of HRW officially responded to legitimate criticisms from pro-Israel sources the way it responded...
Um, somehow I don't think the analogy works: The nation – its economy and political body – has been strapped down, blindfolded and hosed. A new administration, empowered by control of both houses of Congress and the most liberal president in history, is immersing us all in a torrent of debt. While we gasp for breath and try to cry "Time...
The Economist reports this week (August 1, 2009, p 64), "Remittances to developing countries: what goes up," that remittance payments by immigrants, legal and illegal, from developed countries to developing countries has shrunk by a lot. Remittances held up during 2008 but they are a lagging indicator of economic distress, and in 2009 were shrinking radically: [T]he chances that remittances will...
