In association with the International Commission of Jurists

September 2010

21 Sep

We are very pleased to host from today through Friday an online symposium considering Chiara Giorgetti's book A Principled Approach to State Failure: International Community Actions in Emergency Situations (Brill 2010). Dr. Giorgetti, an attorney at White and Case and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center, will be with us for the rest of the week, discussing various of themes from her...

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21 Sep

The following is a guest post from Chimene Keitner, Associate Professor of Law at Hastings.  My thanks to her for contributing it! The Second Circuit’s recent panel opinion in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum has justifiably spurred much talk in the blogosphere, including posts by Trey Childress, Ken Anderson, Julian Ku, and Kevin Jon Heller. Here are my preliminary thoughts. First, it...

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20 Sep

As President Obama prepares to head up to New York for the UN General Assembly meetings, which this year are focused around the 10 year anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), some stories are starting to appear in the papers about the UN and US relations.  Colum Lynch, for example, the Washington Post's UN beat reporter, has an article asking...

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20 Sep

The draft Resolution of Ratification for the New START treaty approved last week by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is now up on Senator Richard Lugar's webpage.  It contains all sorts of required certifications, reports, and briefings.  I can't tell if any of it is really significant by way of constraint.  (Lugar claims in his press release that the required...

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19 Sep

Alan Feuer has a very interesting article in today's NY Times about the Analytic Unit of the NYPD's Intelligence Division. Feuer piece explains To bolster counterterrorism operations after 9/11, the Police Department expanded its Intelligence Division — run by David Cohen, a 30-year veteran of the C.I.A. — with detectives who had mainly spent their careers chasing street gangs, drug lords...

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19 Sep

OK, I never thought I'd write a post tying international arbitration, chess federation elections, and post-Soviet politics together.  Nor did I think that I'd follow that up with a post expanding on the post-Soviet politics issue and also throwing allegations of UFO abductions into the mix. And now, in the midst of all this other drama, World Chess Federation President (and...

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18 Sep

It's always dangerous to opine on a judgment you have only skimmed, so I'll phrase my thought as a question instead.  Here is what the ATS Statute says: The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the...

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17 Sep

I've now had a chance to read a little more closely the decision, majority and concurrence, in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (issued today by a 2nd Circuit panel of Judge Cabranes writing for himself and Judge Wood, and a concurrence in the judgment by Judge Leval).  On second reading, it still looks to me like a blockbuster opinion, both because of the ringing tone of the Cabranes decision and the equally strong language of a concurrence that, on the key point of corporate liability, amounts to a dissent.  With circuits having gone different directions on this issue, this perhaps tees up a SCOTUS review that would revisit its last, delphic pronouncement on the Alien Tort Statute in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain. Here are a few thoughts that add to, but also partly revise and extend, things I said in my earlier post today.
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17 Sep

I have just now been forwarded a copy of the 2nd Circuit opinion released today in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum.  I say "apparently" because I have hastily read it in the last couple of minutes; see also Julian's post above.  But unless I am greatly mistaken, it is a blockbuster opinion on the basics of ATS litigation.  However, the...

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