Weekend Roundup: March 15-21, 2014

This week on Opinio Juris, we continued last week‘s YLS Sale Symposium with a post by Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen describing Sale’s legacy as a game of cat and mouse between law and politics, a post by David Martin on the realms of policy and law in refugee protection. In a two part post (1, 2), Guy Goodwin-Gill looked at state practice preceding Sale and argued that the case was not the watershed moment it is seen to be. T. Alexander Aleinikoff discussed a way forward to ensure that the rights of refugees are adequately protected. Harold Koh closed off the symposium with his reflections on Sale’s legacy.

Also continuing from last week was our Ukraine Insta-Symposium. Boris Mamlyuk argued for a better empirical understanding of the facts on the ground to assess the legality of intervention in Ukraine. As the events in Crimea unfolded, questions of recognition and annexation came into the spotlight with a post by Anna Dolidze on the non-recognition of Crimea, one by Chris analyzing the legality of recognition of a secessionist entity, and one by Greg Fox on the Russian-Crimea treaty.

In other posts, Duncan tried to read the tea leaves in the US Senate confirmation hearings for the new head of US Cyber Command. Julian reported from a hearing of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on the legality of overseas electronic surveillance and predicted that international law will receive short shrift in the Board’s final report. Andrés Guzmán Escobari rebutted an earlier post by Julian and argued that Bolivia’s ICJ case against Chile to obtain access to the Pacific Ocean is reasonably strong. Roger closed off the week with a post on the use of trade remedies to enforce arbitration awards.

Finally, Jessica wrapped up the news and listed events and announcements.

Many thanks to our guest contributors and have a great weekend!