It's a done deal: President Obama will nominate U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow. Kagan will be the first nominee for the Court since the 1970s who has no judicial experience, although I doubt this will be a problem for her (it may even be an asset). As Kevin has already noted, Kagan will probably...
Last week, Russia announced with some fanfare that it had captured several Somali pirates who had attacked a Russian-flagged vessel. It had also announced that (like the U.S.), these pirates would be brought back to Russia for trial. And then yesterday, Russia announced...
Yesterday a federal court in New York granted Chevron's request for discovery of outtakes from the 2009 documentary Crude about the multi-billion dollar litigation in Ecuador. Chevron's request was pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1782, which authorizes a judge in the United States to order discovery of evidence to be used in proceedings before a foreign tribunal. As reported here, Chevron's...
That is what Mike Allen is reporting at Politico. If he's right, our next Supreme Court Justice will likely be the woman who recently argued this (h/t: my friend Steve Vladeck): [W]ith regard to the material support statute, there are substantial (pending) issues with regard to its scope, given that the Ninth Circuit invalidated the "service," "training," and "expert...
Ian Hurd, the distinguished scholar of international organizations (e.g., After Anarchy) at Northwestern University, has posted to SSRN a short response to an article much-discussed here at OJ, Michael Glennon, "The Blank Prose Crime of Aggression." Professor Hurd's response is titled, "How Not to Argue Against the Crime of Aggression." It is not long, elegantly argued and usefully systematic, and...
[caption id="attachment_12297" align="alignright" width="180" caption="Judge Thomas Buergenthal"][/caption] Sure, some guy named John Paul Stevens is retiring from the U.S. Supreme Court, but there is another big judicial resignation this spring to note. Thomas Buergenthal, the U.S. member of the International Court of Justice, has announced that he will not finish out his term on the court. I am breaking some news...
As most people probably know, Duke's Guy-Uriel Charles wrote a devastating blog post criticizing the lack of diversity in Harvard Law School hiring while Elena Kagan was Dean. (Short version: 28 of 29 were white, one was asian; 23 of the 29 were men.) The White House has now pushed back against the post by releasing what strikes me as...
Michael Kearney at the University of York has written a long and interesting response to Julian's post, which I have posted below to make sure people see it. I'm far from expert about the law of statehood, so I'm reluctant to comment on the international-law debate. I continue to believe, though, that accepting the Palestinian declaration would be disastrous for...
Joe Lieberman has just rolled out a bill (text here) which would strip individuals associated with foreign terrorist groups of their US citizenship. He's been playing this as if it were a minor statutory fix. It's true, as he's been stressing, that current law terminates citizenship for "entering, or serving in, the armed forces of a foreign state if (a) ...
Last year, the Palestinian National Authority filed a declaration accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. This declaration is controversial, to say the least, because it could potentially give the ICC jurisdiction over Israeli military forces operating in Gaza or the West Bank. Today, the ICC released a summary of the submissions it has received on whether the Palestinian's...
My colleague Marc DeGirolami has a guest post over at PrawfsBlawg reacting to an op-ed in today's New York Times by Jean-François Copé, the the majority leader of the French National Assembly, in which Copé defends banning the burqa and the niqab. While Marc sees that the argument that the burqa runs counter to Western culture "is not without considerable force"...
What's the only modern international or internationalized criminal tribunal that either has or had universal jurisdiction? Answer: The Special Panels in East Timor....
