In association with the International Commission of Jurists

August 2010

04 Aug

The ongoing saga regarding Chevron’s legal travails in Ecuador took an interesting twist this week. As I reported earlier, Chevron has secured key outtakes of the movie Crude that appeared to show alarming collusion between the plaintiff lawyers and the Court-appointed expert. According to pleadings filed yesterday pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1782, the outtakes include some amazing communications...

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04 Aug

I've argued for the past couple of years that the ICC should open a formal investigation into the situation in Colombia, because it is a non-African situation that satisfies most, if not all, of my criteria for situational gravity: (1) crimes committed with government involvement; (2) systematic criminality; (3) socially alarming crimes such as enforced disappearance and torture.  Here is...

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03 Aug

Adam Serwer has a post up flagging a new suit by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) against the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) over funds expended over the question of whether the Obama administration can designate and then target Al-Awlaki as a terrorist hiding out presumably in Yemen.  (Adam tried to contact me to...

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02 Aug

Justice Ginsburg has fired the latest salvo in the ongoing debate about the Court's use of foreign and international law sources in constitutional adjudication.   On Friday, she gave a speech to the International Academy of Comparative Law at American University, entitled "A decent respect to the Opinions of [Human]kind": The Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication.  Not surprisingly given her...

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02 Aug

Sorry for the light posting of late - the Anderson family is currently in the Sierra Nevada, the eastern side out of Bishop, California, on God's own highway, the Empty Quarter of Highway 395, which runs north-south from southern California all the way up the eastern Sierra and beyond.  It is both the most beautiful and most varied countryside you...

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