I want to call readers' attention to Douglas Guilfoyle's article "The Mavi Marmara Incident and Blockade in Armed Conflict," which is forthcoming in the British Year Book of International Law. (Subscription required.) It's absolutely superb -- comprehensive, analytic, and above all fair. Indeed, its conclusions differ in important ways from those of the UN HRC report, the Turkel Commission inquiry...
Professor Cecilia Marcela Bailliet of the University of Oslo has a very useful post over at IntLawGrrls on possible criminal punishment for right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik. Contrary to what has been reported elsewhere, according to Bailliet it is possible that Breivik could get life in prison for the death of 76 persons in last week's shooting. Here's...
Though it produced hardly a ripple in the news (given all the other drama on Capitol Hill this week), Senator Leahy held a hearing yesterday on the legislation he has introduced to enforce the notification provisions of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) at the state level. The webcast of the hearing, aptly titled "Fulfilling our Treaty Obligations and...
David Hicks is back in the news here in Australia, because the DPP has announced that it intends to seize any royalties he receives from the sale of his book, Guantanamo: My Journey. The DPP's decision has received a great deal of criticism, for a variety of reasons: Hicks accepted a plea because the US government threatened to put him...
Ken Anderson, Jeremy Rabkin, and Jenny Martinez expand in various ways on the concern about constructing a grand narrative introduced on Monday by Harlan Cohen. Anderson discusses a number of questions that might have been used to frame the narrative: legitimacy, the use of international law as a sword or a shield, sovereignty versus internationalism, authority and deference, hegemony, and...
I want to thank the editors of Opinio Juris for hosting this forum and inviting me to participate, the editors of the Volume under review for their magnificent work in putting together such an impressive and comprehensive set of essays, and Andrew Kent for his thoughtful response to my contribution to the Volume. Let me here take up the two main...
I would like to thank Opinio Juris for hosting this book discussion, and I would like to thank the several contributors for their insightful and provocative posts. This post responds specifically to Andrew Kent's skeptical reaction to David Golove's claim that the judiciary had an active role in policing executive branch compliance with the laws of war. I believe that...
The joy of this project was making the kind of discovery Roger Alford recounts in his post. Alford’s chapter on international law as interpretive tool from 1901 to 1945 discusses, among other things, the Supreme Court’s various approaches to the extraterritorial reach of statutes during that period. Among these approaches was the government purpose test of Unites States v. Bowman...
One of the most intriguing and admirable aspects of this book is that the editors have included within it a scathing critique of the project as a whole. In Chapter 5, “A Social History of International Law: A Historical Commentary, 1861-1900,” John Fabian Witt comments on three preceding chapters on the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence during that period. ...
It is a pleasure to hold International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court in my hands and flip through its pages. It is a volume that I have long wished for – a comprehensive reference book, in the pages of which one can be confident of finding an intelligent summary all the major Supreme Court cases from any given...
I’m grateful to the regulars at Opinio Juris for inviting me to comment on INTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE U.S. SUPREME COURT, because it’s an especially valuable work. I admire the industry displayed by the contributors to this volume. They have gone through a vast number of...
