February 2011

Libya: Did Citizen Evacuations Stand in the Way of Better Policy?

It now seems to be the conventional wisdom (hard to shake once in place) that the U.S. has been slow off the mark on Libya.  That may have consequences for U.S. standing in the region.  As long-time Middle East hand Aaron David Miller put it in a tweet this morning: "the arab spring isn't mainly our story; but president obama...

Conceptualizing Accountability in International Law and Institutions

I had the privilege of moderating a panel today at the Yale International Law Journal annual confab of junior (meaning untenured?) scholars, a panel on accountability of international organizations.  International organizations in this setting means the United Nations, but also a vast array of organizations beyond what we ordinarily think of as the UN (the General Assembly, Security Council, Secretariat, etc.), including many organs and sub-organizations of the UN, and many others, such as the World Bank or the World Trade Organization, that might be in some formal sense part of institutions the UN system but which in fact have their own mechanisms of governance and funding.  The three panelists were Kristin Boon (Seton Hall), David Gartner (Arizona), and Stadler Trengrove (UN Office of Legal Counsel), and their remarks were uniformly excellent, and I commend their work to you. I I am a skeptic of global governance on grounds of being both unachievable on the terms and to the ends that its proponents seek, and undesirable as well, so I am perhaps a surprising choice to moderate a panel that takes more or less as an assumption both of those things.  I am finishing the copy edits of a book to appear in May or June from Hoover Press, Living with the UN, which includes such phrases as “The General Assembly, which vascillates between waste and wickedness ...”  You catch my drift.  My basic point in that book, however, is the message to American conservatives that the UN is not going anywhere and they need to work that into their calculations, principally by turning the vacuous slogan of the Obama administration of  “engagement” with anything that looks “multilateral” into a genuine policy.  Principally that means treating different parts of the UN differently, and engaging with them, or not, or sometimes deeply opposing and obstructing them, each according to its function and effects.

ICCPR and IHL

Bobby Chesney and Human Rights First's Daphne Eviatar debate the extent to which the ICCPR applies in Afghanistan and, in important matters, in regimes of IHL.  The back and forth at Lawfare is well worth reading. Let me be distressingly candid.  This is an area in which I find it difficult to get "inside" the legal debate because I find it...

Will Anyone Publish Saif Gaddafi’s Book on Civil Society?

We already knew that Muammar scion Saif Gaddafi had written a dissertation at LSE entitled “The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions: From Soft Power to Collective Decision Making?” But I didn't know that it was slated to be published by Oxford University Press.  This at HuffPo from Ben Barber (who, ahem, knows something about...

The “Libya and Humanitarian Intervention” Meme

"Libya"and "humanitarian intervention" are being used more and more often in the same sentence.  Over at Ratio Juris, Patrick O'Donnell has a round-up of  blog posts and opinion pieces concerning humanitarian intervention and the situation in Libya. Patrick's post is especially helpful for anyone trying to get up to speed on this issue as it includes a bibliography on humanitarian intervention, more...

Event on Miranda and Terrorist Suspects

In case any one finds themselves in/around Philadelphia on March 5, this event may be of interest: Supreme Court litigators Carter G. Phillips and Kannon Shanmugam will argue a case based on hypothetical federal legislation that exempts police from issuing Miranda warnings to individuals suspected of terrorism. A jury of nine distinguished judges will decide if such legislation can withstand constitutional...

Orin Kerr on the Strange Fourth Amendment Case of Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd

Orin Kerr is the Fourth Amendment scholar that I definitely am not, so I read with interest his Volokh post this morning on Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd, which the Supreme Court will be hearing next week.  He says it is a strange case for a couple of reasons.  The two basic issues in the case are: First, whether using the material witness...