In association with the International Commission of Jurists

February 2012

23 Feb

The Yale Journal of International Law (YJIL) is pleased to continue its partnership with Opinio Juris through this symposium. Today we will be discussing an Article by Oona A. Hathaway (Yale Law School), Sabria McElroy, and Sara Aronchick Solow, (both Yale Law School class of 2010) entitled International Law at Home: Enforcing Treaties in U.S. Courts and published in Vol....

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23 Feb

Readers interested in watching Ben Wittes desperately try to spin British condemnation of the U.S. approach to the war on terror need only check out his post today on Rahmatullah.  As I discussed a couple of months ago, the British Court of Appeals held that Rahmatullah was entitled to be released from U.S. custody because the U.S. had rendered him...

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23 Feb

Last week the Fifth Circuit rendered a fascinating decision in McGee v. Arkel Int'l about choice-of-law rules as applied to torts in Iraq. I've never seen anything quite like the Iraqi law in question, so I thought it is worth sharing for the private international law aficionados among our readers. The Iraqi law in question, passed by the...

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22 Feb

Various right-wing commentators, Mitt Romney, and dozens of congressmen have demanded that the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, be prosecuted for genocide for advocating (in one debatable translation) the destruction of Israel.  I wonder if they will be quite so passionate about demanding a similar fate for Tucker Carlson, who earlier today openly advocated the destruction of Iran by the...

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22 Feb

I'm not sure I approve of this trend: Legal claims can now be served via Facebook in Britain, after a landmark ruling in the English High Court. Mr Justice Teare gave the go-ahead for the social networking site to be used in a commercial case where there were difficulties locating one of the parties. Facebook is routinely used to serve claims in Australia...

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21 Feb

My previous post mentioned battlefield robot analogs of dogs, cheetahs, pack animals, even humans. Now behold the synchronized nanobot swarm!  Here's what national security analyst John Robb had to say about the tactical benefits of a battlefield drone swarm: •It cuts the enemy target off from supply and communications. •It adversely impacts the morale of the target. •It makes a coordinated defense extremely difficult (resource allocation is...

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21 Feb

The New York Times Magazine has a story that is oddly depressing, on the one hand, and counter-intuitively optimistic, on the other - a report by Russell Shorto called simply, The Way Greeks Live Now (February 13, 2012).  At the macro-level, things look unremittingly bleak; even if the latest deal reached last night holds, I don't think anyone believes it...

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