November 2010

I am delighted to announce that Stanford University Press has now published The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law, which I edited with the University of Toronto's Markus Dubber.  The book contains chapters on the substantive criminal law of 16 different countries, including some on which there has been little English-language scholarship, such as Iran, Egypt, China, and Argentina. ...

That's the excellent question asked by Ian, one of the commenters on Roger's recent post.  The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Le Monde, and El Pais -- all are just as guilty of violating the Espionage Act as WikiLeaks.  There is no "we redacted some of the documents" defense in the Act, and prosecuting a news organization after...

The Wikileaks episode seems to be turning to the USG's advantage, at least domestically: it's provoking a lot of sympathy for the government as an entity.  That's a rare sentiment these days.  Leave aside angry calls for Assange's head (almost literally), people are actually feeling sorry for the USG. One way that's being expressed is to compare the government to private...

Harold Koh has warned Wikileaks of the dire consequences to the United States resulting from the publication of over 250,000 classified documents. But I doubt that Julian Assange and Wikileaks cares much about the damage done to our nation from this breach. What they presumably do care about is criminal prosecution. As Marc Thiessen at the Washington...

I suspect this will be a much bigger story than the previous Iraq and Afghanistan disclosures, mostly because there will be something here for everyone.  I'm not sure that the State Department looks particularly bad, as Timothy Garten Ash explains.  It shouldn't be a revelation to anyone that diplomats sometimes do something that looks like spying.  This is much more...

[Beth Van Schaack is an Associate Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and contributor to IntLawGrrls.] Professor Guilfoyle’s article makes a discrete and important contribution to his growing body of work on maritime law and the problem of piracy in the Gulf of Aden. The article cogently argues that international humanitarian law (‘IHL’) does not apply to most instances...

[Dr Douglas Guilfoyle is a Lecturer in Law at the Faculty of Laws, University College London.] It is sometimes suggested that because pirates were described by classical authors as hostes humani generis (enemies of humankind) or because the Security Council has authorised the use of ‘necessary means’ in repressing Somali piracy that the laws of armed conflict ('LOAC') must (or might)...

[Steven Freeland is a Professor in International Law at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, Visiting Professor of International Law at the University of Copenhagen, a member of the Space Law Committee at the International Law Association, a member of the Directorate of Studies at the International Institute of Space Law and a Faculty Member of the London Institute of...