You saw this coming: House Republicans introduced legislation today that seeks to force major changes at the United Nations, using as leverage the threat to withhold some of the U.S.’s 22 percent contribution to the world body’s operating budget. The bill by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, would demand that the UN let countries decide how...
The Volokh Conspiracy is hosting a discussion of a new book on media bias entitled Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts The American Mind. Here is a snippet from the summary on the Amazon page: Dr. Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA, has spent years constructing precise, quantitative measures of the slant of...
China has tons of disputes with its neighbors regarding borders, especially maritime borders. It has recently been embroiled in disputes with Japan and all of its Southeast Asian neighbors over various claims in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Since all relevant nations are members of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, one might...
CLR Forum is an impressive new entry to the law professor blogosphere has been launched by my St. John's colleagues Mark Movsesian and Marc DeGirolami. The CLR Forum is the official blog of the St.John's Center for Law and Religion, a center which in just one year has put itself on the map hosting conferences and significant scholarly exchange...
Apropos of Kevin's post below criticizing China's new criminal procedure law amendments, it is worth noting that some Chinese legal scholars are defending the consistency of such laws with international treaties. China's draft amendment to the Criminal Procedure Law will further help protect human rights, and conforms rather than contradicts international conventions, legal experts in Beijing have said. The experts made the...
The NYT reports on an interesting strategy by an Italian village to avoid political oblivion. Statehood and independence! The mayor of Filettino has loftier aspirations: he wants his town in the hills east of Rome — population 598 — to become an independentstate under a monarch. “If that’s what it takes to keep the town autonomous and protect its natural resources,” said the...
Not shocking, really. Aug 29, 2011 (Voice of America News/ContentWorks via COMTEX) -- Libya's rebel government said Sunday it will not extradite the Libyan man convicted in the 1988 bombing of a U.S.-bound jetliner which killed 270 people when it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Mohammed al-Alagi, the Transitional National Council's justice minister, told reporters in Tripoli that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi already has been...
Adam Entous and Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal's national security reporting team have a good discussion of the targeted killing-drone strike on August 22, 2011 that killed Attiyah Abd al-Rahman, Al-Qaeda's second in command. A considerable part of the Pakistani government's irritation with the conduct of drone strikes is that the US not only does not seek permission -...
As some readers may know, I spent four years writing television in Los Angeles -- law, cop, and terrorism shows -- before becoming an academic. When I wrote scripts, I prided myself on accuracy: although I occasionally took artistic license, I always tried to get the law and facts right as best I could. So it bothers me to no...
It's not every day that a state enacts a law that blatantly authorizes crimes against humanity, so I feel obligated to give a special shout-out to China, who intend to make the crime against humanity of enforced disappearance official government policy: Chinese police will gain new legal powers to detain suspects for up to six months without telling their families...
This legal opinion by Oxford prof Guy Goodwin-Gill has been drawing some attention in recent days. It argues that the planned campaign to establish a Palestinian state this fall at the United Nations has a number of policy and legal pitfalls that could work against the interests of most Palestinians. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Al-Jazeera: You tackle three...
