When Bill Dodge, Michael Ramsey and David Sloss approached me to write a chapter for their forthcoming book, I told them that I would be interested in doing so as long as I did not have to rehash the tired contemporary debate about constitutional comparativism. They quickly agreed and I had the good fortune to write a chapter on...
Harlan Cohen and Ingrid Wuerth have provided characteristically insightful comments about the overall strengths and weaknesses of the book. Cohen cautions that its “grand narrative” may make the outcomes of particular cases seem “overdetermined” and suggest that the Supreme Court is more “purposive” about its use of international law than is actually the case. Wuerth tactfully notes that the editors’...
Thank you to Opinio Juris for having me back. It’s always a great pleasure and honor to guest blog at such a terrific forum. The volume of essays under review is an impressive and extraordinarily useful collection. I learned something—and often many things—from every essay I read. I was consistently impressed with how the authors discussed controversial and...
I don't mean to interrupt this great discussion of the "International Law in the Supreme Court" Book Discussion (to which I also made a very small contribution). But I can't resist a brief note on a case this term that promises to bring international law back to the Supreme Court, if only indirectly. Here is the NYT write-up: Menachem Zivotofsky was...
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court, edited by Bill Dodge, Mike Ramsey and David Sloss. Mike has already described the book’s purpose and organizational structure in a post from this morning. My post focuses on some of the book’s overall strengths and perhaps weaknesses. Edited volumes are hard to do...
First, let me start by thanking Duncan and the entire OJ crew, as well as David Sloss, Mike Ramsey, and Bill Dodge, for the opportunity to engage this amazing project. The book is an extraordinary accomplishment, magisterial in scope yet elegant in execution. Pulling together the material here – over 200 years of jurisprudence, countless decisions, and essays...
On behalf of myself and my co-editors David Sloss and William Dodge, thanks to Opinio Juris for hosting this book discussion. As readers of this blog know, the twenty-first century’s first decade was an extraordinarily active one for international law in the Supreme Court. In the debates about leading cases such as Medellin v. Texas and Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, we...
Three stories to mention. First, Moreno-Ocampo plans to introduce WikiLeaks cables in the trial of the six Kenyan defendants: This emerged as he prepares to hand over the last batch of the evidence he will rely on in the September hearing against three of Kenya’s six post-election violence suspects. The evidence to be released on Wednesday relates to the...
I'm pleased to announce that Opinio Juris is hosting its latest book discussion this coming week. We will feature International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court (CUP, 2011), which was edited by David Sloss, Mike Ramsey, and Bill Dodge. In the interest of disclosure, I would note that two Opinio Juris regulars participated in the volume: I authored the second chapter on how the...
Bloomberg BusinessWeek offers what is slowly becoming conventional wisdom on the ICTY, at least, if not international criminal justice in general. Credit [] is due to the court, which focused on individual responsibility rather than collective guilt. This helped foster reconciliation among Serbs, Croats and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. But beyond the Balkans, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the...
As I discussed in a recent post, "the new age of self-publishing is fast approaching the world of legal scholarship. It will just take a few legacy scholars to create a norm cascade that will rock the world of legacy publishing." Self-publishing is the new, new thing. We've already embraced it with blogging and SSRN, and now some...
With Julian's many interesting posts on UNCLOS, I thought I would flag for our readers Andrew Guzman's interesting essay published on SSRN entitled the "Consent Problem in International Law." Here's the abstract: The legal obligations of a state are overwhelmingly based on its consent to be bound. This commitment to consent preserves the power of states, but also creates a...
