Opinio Juris is pleased to announce an online symposium addressing social activism and international law. As our readers know, Kony 2012 was a YouTube sensation, spreading faster than any video in history. Although the details are airbrushed, the central theme of the video is about international law. The key idea of the video is that the indicted fugitive Joseph Kony...
I've been following the standoff between the Philippines Navy and Chinese "surveillance" ships in the South China Sea (or West Philippines Sea) with some concern. As I noted here, China has some rather expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea that countries like the Philippines are resisting. But given the relative sizes of their navies, it is obvious that...
The answers to my questions last week were no further away than the latest copy of the AJIL and an important article by Emilie Hafner-Burton, David Victor, and Yonatan Lupu on Political Science Research and International Law: The State of the Field. This is a must-read for anyone interested in IR/IL, past and future. As for the "war on paradigms", it has...
Michigan Law Review is out with its Annual Survey of Books in the law, and while the self-promotion is awkward at the least, it feels a bit more in the interest of full disclosure (given what I’ve blogged about here in the past) to note that the issue includes my review of Ben Wittes’ latest book, Detention and Denial. A...
The US-backed Korean-American Jim Yong Kim was named the next president of the World Bank, in a move that drew criticism about the purported dominance of the post by the United States. The Philippines will take its dispute with China in the South China Sea to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). Meanwhile, Tokyo's governor wants to use public fund to purchase...
I have no idea whether it's true, but that's what the BBC is reporting: The International Criminal Court could soon drop its demand that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi be transferred to the Hague for trial, officials have told the BBC. They say the most prominent son of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi could instead be tried inside Libya but under the supervision...
I know these polls might not reflect a whole lot of deliberation or thoughtfulness, but still, it is amazing to me: Nearly three quarters of Britons think human rights have become a ‘charter for criminals’, a poll has revealed. It showed a strong majority of 72 per cent hold negative views about the role of human rights laws. Only one in six said...
Last month, I was scheduled to attend Cyber Dialogue 2012 - What is Stewardship in Cyberspace? at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. I was quite excited to attend given the line-up of participants with a truly diverse set of backgrounds and areas of expertise. Unfortunately, despite nearly nine hours in the Philadelphia airport, I never made it...
Daniel Klaidman, the journalist whose June 2012 book "Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency" looks to be a must-read, has sent in a guest post to Lawfare discussing how the Stephen Preston speech came about and a bit of the inside maneuvering around the succession of speeches by Eric Holder, Harold Koh,...
Dean Paul Schiff Berman has a new book entitled Global Legal Pluralism (Cambridge University Press 2012) that I heartily recommend to our readers. Here's the abstract: We live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, supranational, and nonstate communities. Navigating these...
Ben Davis sends me this update on the new evidence submitted to the International Criminal Court against the Catholic Church. Today, a survivor-led support group for sex abuse victims, which is under attack by U.S. Catholic officials, submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC) new and extensive documentation that the organization says shows ongoing child rape by Catholic clergy and continuing...
Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla has admitted for the first time that the country's brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship "disappeared" leftist opponents and said babies were kidnapped from their parents. A team of six UN observers has gone to Syria, where despite both sides agreeing to a truce, violence is still raging. South Sudan has accused Sudan of indiscriminate bombing in a dispute...
