Weekend Roundup: October 6 -12, 2012

This week on Opinio Juris, Eric Posner’s Slate article about the legality of US drone strikes in Pakistan attracted the attention of Julian Ku and Kevin Jon Heller. Julian wondered whether Koh’s “conversion” on the issue will serve as a shield against international arguments about the illegality of the strikes. Kevin in turn expressed hope that Posner’s rejection of the “unwilling or unable” test will stop the spread of this standard from the US into non-US opinio juris.

Kevin reflected, twice, on how history tends to repeat itself, drawing parallels between the definition of combatant in the Vietnam War and for present day ‘signature strikes’, and about the use of the ‘water cure‘ during the war in the Philippines (which was however found to constitute torture in later reviews).  A picture of that water cure was posted on a new blog, called Geographical Imaginations, which Kevin welcomed to the blogosphere.

Duncan Hollis flagged that the case of Carol Anne Bond is back on the US Supreme Court’s radar screen following an application for certiorari and, if accepted, may provide an opportunity to revisit Missouri v. Holland.

We also provided a platform this week to the Leiden Journal of International law, for a symposium on its latest issue. A first article discussed was the editorial by Jean d’Aspremont who lamented the diffused power of interpretative power in international law and the resulting ‘wordfare’ about naming. Comments were provided by Francesco Messineo and Michael Kearney. Jean’s response is here.

A second article, by Jean Galbraith, assessed to what extent good deeds are taken into account in sentencing in international criminal law. Meg deGuzman and Mark Drumbl provided commentary, to which Jean replied here.

Finally, as every week we provided you with a list of upcoming events and with our weekday news wraps.

Thank you to our guest contributors and have a nice weekend!