It’s widely recognized that our discussions as international lawyers extend beyond the specific subject matter of international law, at least as traditionally defined. (When I introduce the students in Georgia’s international law colloquium to the types of scholarship they’ll encounter, I describe international law as just one of four or five different subjects international lawyers write about.) And...
Was the Durban climate conference a success or failure? As always, the answer depends on one's frame of reference. As compared to the expectations going in, the outcome was more than I think most people thought possible. In a pre-Durban paper entitled "W[h]ither the Kyoto Protocol," I identified three scenarios: (1) business-as-usual, with modest progress in developing the Copenhagen/Cancun framework and...
The Supreme Court announced a grant this morning in the SB 1070 case. I don't know why the Court took the case. It could easily have ducked. There are other cases working their way through the pipeline from copycat states (Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina). The Court could have waited for further "percolation" of the issue in the lower...
As Peggy mentioned in her introduction, I’ve had the honor of working with two extraordinary co-chairs, Chiara Giorgetti and Cymie Payne, and an incomparable group of Program Committee members, including OJ’s own Chris Borgen, in planning the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law. This year’s theme is “Confronting Complexity.” The theme statement can be...
In the early morning hours of Sunday morning (after two all-night negotiating sessions), climate negotiators at the Durban Conference reached a deal that some are already calling historic. The decisions call for a new commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol together with the launching of a new round of negotiation (with the catchy title, "Durban Platform for Enhanced Action") aimed at...
Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkol Karman delivered their Nobel Lectures today in Oslo. It was a great day of celebration for the cause of gender equality and democracy. You should read all three lectures in their entirety to give you the full picture of what transpired. The common theme was the power of...
Reading Dan Bodansky’s accounts of the difficulties inherent in reaching a new climate agreement, I’m reminded of a terrific new paper forthcoming in Penn Law Review, "Codifying Custom," by my colleague, Tim Meyer. Tim demonstrates that the types of power plays that make negotiation of new rules so difficult are equally present in attempts to “codify” existing rules. The codification...
[Shana Tabak is a Visiting Associate Professor of Clinical Law at The George Washington University Law School, where she is also a Friedman Fellow with the International Human Rights Clinic. She is the author of False Dichotomies of Transitional Justice: Gender, Conflict and Combatants in Colombia, 44 N.Y.U. J. Int'l L. & Pol. 103 (2011).] I’m very grateful to Professors...
[Ruti G. Teitel is the Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law at New York Law School.] I am happy to join the conversation on Shana Tabak’s "False dichotomies of Transitional Justice Gender, Conflict and Combatants in Colombia," forthcoming in the next issue of the NYU Journal of International Law & Politics. Tabak’s article is a thoughtful meditation on the...
[Vasuki Nesiah is an Associate Professor of Practice at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.] From manufacturing petrol bombs in their homes in Northern Ireland to planning assassinations in Colombia, female combatants confound received scripts of gender and war. Shana Tabak’s article challenges the analytical frameworks deployed by orthodox approaches to transitional justice, lays out an alternative framework that she...
[Shana Tabak is a Visiting Associate Professor of Clinical Law at The George Washington University Law School, where she is also a Friedman Fellow with the International Human Rights Clinic.] Although the field of transitional justice has made great strides in addressing harms perpetrated against women in the aftermath of conflict, this paper argues that transitional justice mechanisms mistakenly rely on...
[Ming-Sung Kuo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick Law School. He is the author of Taming Governance with Legality? Critical Reflections upon Global Administrative Law as Small-c Global Constitutionalism, 44 N.Y.U. J. Int'l L. & Pol. 55 (2011).] It is a great pleasure and honour to have Professors Karl-Heinz Ladeur and David Gartner as interlocutors in response...
