Weekend Roundup: May 19-25, 2012

This week on Opinio Juris, we continued last week’s book discussion of Laura Dickinson’s Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs, with Laura’s post on the role of organizational structure and institutional structure as a mechanism of accountability and constraint, and her response to Steve Vladeck and to the other commentators.

In a guest post, David Sloss proposed a rule to resolve conduct-based immunity defenses in cases under the Alien Tort Statute and/or the Torture Victim Protection Act.

Until he found a searchable version, Kevin Jon Heller was floored by the Special Court for Sierra Leone’s 2499 page judgment in the Charles Taylor case, and asked whether the length would affect the length of Taylor’s sentence. Kevin also commented on Mauretania’s indictment of former Libyan spy chief al-Sennusi, and he wrote about his proposal for a new book entitled A Genealogy of International Criminal Law.

Julian Ku posted a video link to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that took place on Wednesday, but reportedly ended in a decision to postpone the vote until after the November elections. UNCLOS was also the theme of Peter Spiro’s post on the use of the term “sovereignty” by the American Sovereignty Campaign advocating ratification.

Peter Spiro also discussed how non-state actors are increasing their influence in international organizations, including formally intergovernmental ones such as the WTO and the ITU.

As every week, we also provided a list of upcoming events and the weekday news wrap.

Have a nice weekend!