There is an old adage that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. The rejoinder is that a liberal is a conservative who has been indicted. Speaking of which, an intriguing development in the case of the Christian terrorists: All members of the anti-government Hutaree group, who wanted to start a violent revolution against the government...
Fascinating speech by Andrew Shapiro, Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs at the U.S. State Department on U.S. government views on counter-piracy policy. Of special interest, the U.S. may try changing the law on prosecuting pirates. How exactly to do that is a bit unclear (treaty? custom?), but it seems like a promising avenue. At least it is a new idea,...
NGO Monitor loves to criticize progressive NGOs for a lack of transparency concerning their funding. A recent report, for example, predictably attacks Human Rights Watch for not identifying all of its donors, particularly those at last year's fundraising event in Saudi Arabia: HRW publishes the names and amounts provided by some of its donors, but others remain hidden. Although HRW...
This is just the first round of a potentially huge investor-state arbitration claim filed by Chevron against Ecuador. $700 million now, but up to $27 billion later. (For some background, see here and here about a federal court's refusal to stay one of the arbitration proceedings.). Chevron Corp (CVX.N) won a three-year-old arbitration fight against Ecuador over a commercial dispute as...
Forgive the self-promotion, but I was just sent the cover of my co-edited book (with Markus Dubber, who teaches at Toronto), and I think it's really cool. The Handbook, which will be published in November by Stanford University Press, is the first edited book on comparative substantive criminal law. It contains seventeen chapters -- 16 chapters on the...
Yesterday's oral argument in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd gave strong indications that the Court was prepared to extend the territorial limitations of Hoffman-La Rouche v. Empagran to the securities fraud context. Morrison involves a class action brought by foreign plaintiffs against a foreign stock issuer on a foreign exchange for alleged fraud that occurred on foreign soil....
AP reports that a Dutch court of appeals has affirmed a lower court ruling that held the UN could not be sued for its failure to protect Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica: Appeals judges have ruled that relatives of victims of Europe's worst massacre since World War II cannot sue the United Nations for compensation in a Dutch court. Lawyers for...
Sudan is preparing for a national election next month. It may not be the solution for Sudan, given that it is still very doubtful that there is enough cohesiveness for a genuine democratic result. Still, I wonder if the ICC's Prosecutor may be going a little far here. A day after Sudan president Omar al-Bashir threatened to cut the fingers off...
A quick note for interested readers -- the Texas Law Review has just published my latest article, Unpacking the Compact Clause. They've posted a copy of it here as well. My own abstract of the piece follows. The Compact Clause prohibits U.S. states from making “any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power” absent congressional consent. No one, however, has ever...
I thought ASIL and the program organizers did a wonderful job with this year's Annual Meeting. I particularly appreciated the opportunity to chair a panel, War and Law in Cyberspace. In addition to a discussion of the technological capacities of cyberattacks and how they map onto the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, we had a good discussion of what...
Fascinating inside baseball piece on the Obama Administration's internal debate over war on terrorism policy. It features a struggle between the State Department (Harold Koh) and the Defense Department (Jeh Johnson) with the OLC (David Barron) playing referee. The rift has been most pronounced between top lawyers in the State Department and the Pentagon, though it has also involved conflicts among career...
David Bernstein links today to an article in The Times -- a right-wing British newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch -- attacking Human Rights Watch. The article is breathlessly entitled "Nazi Scandal Engulfs Human Rights Watch," which I have to admit piqued my curiousity -- until I realized that the "Nazi scandal" concerned Marc Gelasco, a research analyst who resigned from...
