In association with the International Commission of Jurists

June 2010

24 Jun

U.S. courts have long struggled with questions about the extraterritorial scope of U.S. federal law.  Many U.S. laws regulating business activities, most notoriously antitrust law, have been interpreted to apply to conduct outside U.S. territory, even by foreign nationals. And this all has been a constant irritant to foreign nations, who have sometimes complained about the expansive, sometimes imperialistic, application...

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22 Jun

That’s a remarkable statement, but it actually is true. Yesterday the Supreme Court in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project addressed the question of whether a federal statute criminalizing the provision of “material support” to terrorist organizations was constitutional. A humanitarian NGO group wanted to train members of two terrorist organizations, the PKK and the LTTE, to become more...

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22 Jun

The American Society of International Law has an active International Economic Law (IEL) Interest Group. Most notably, it holds a biennial conference geared to a common IEL theme, with the papers presented then collected and published in some form, including THE POLITICS OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC LAW, Tomer Broude, Amy Porges and Marc L. Busch eds., Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2010);...

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21 Jun

Cross-posted at Balkinization Nothing like summertime to catch up on a little light reading I spent too little time with during the semester. So especially after being re-energized at this year’s American Constitution Society Convention (where I did a panel with Gene Fidell and others far more interesting than I on military commissions vs. federal courts, and got treated to...

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21 Jun

Dapo Akande has an important post today at EJIL: Talk! that asks, as he puts it, "what exactly was agreed in Kampala on the crime of aggression?"  I think this paragraph is particularly important: The opt out provision is the most confusing aspect of the aggression amendments. Who exactly  is required to opt out? Once the requisite number of...

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21 Jun

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has confirmed Joan Donoghue as the choice to fill the vacancy on the ICJ left by Judge Thomas Buergenthal. She describes Donoghue as “judicious, fair, an extraordinary international legal counsel, and an excellent choice for the Court.“ Let me also pick up on a comment to my previous post, in which Peter Trooboff defends Donoghue’s independence...

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21 Jun

I don't know what to make of this report about a controversial device used to repel teenagers and children by using a high-pitched frequency only young people can hear. The mosquito works by emitting a pulse at 16-18.5 kilohertz that switches on and off four times a second for up to 20 minutes. It emits an irritating, high-pitched sound that can...

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20 Jun

Peyton Cooke has an interesting paper on the status of "intelligence" activities in international and domestic law.  It doesn't seem to be on SSRN, but it is "Bringing the Spies in from the Cold: Legal Cosmopolitanism and Intelligence under the Laws of War," 44 USFLRev 601 (Winter 2010).  The argument takes up Eric Posner's critique of "legal cosmopolitanism," as a...

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18 Jun

I kind of expected this would turn out this way, but it does the Rwandan government no credit that they finally released jailed U.S. law professor Peter Erlinder, albeit on bail and due to concerns about his health.  Needless to say, I doubt Professor Erlinder will be returning to Rwanda anytime soon. Peter Erlinder, the American lawyer jailed inRwanda after being...

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17 Jun

Interesting story in the NYT about the U.N.'s difficulty in creating a fair and effective system to resolve internal disputes, especially employee disputes.  Last July, the U.N. created a new Dispute Tribunal composed of independent judges to remedy a much despised previous system.  But the new Tribunal, and the U.N. bureaucracy's unwillingness to cooperate with it, is getting some tough...

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