In association with the International Commission of Jurists

April 2014

30 Apr

The ASIL Mid-Year Research Forum has fast become known as one of the best workshopping opportunities for new and established international law scholars alike.  It was launched by Kal Raustiala in 2011 at the Mid-Year meeting in LA, moved to Athens, Georgia in 2012, northwards to New York in 2013, and this year will take place in Chicago from November...

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30 Apr

[Ryan Scoville is an Assistant Professor of Law at Marquette University Law School.] Recently the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Zivotofsky v. Kerry to resolve an important question in U.S. foreign relations law: does the power to recognize foreign states and governments belong exclusively to the President, or do the political branches hold it concurrently? More specifically, Zivotofsky concerns the constitutionality of Section 214(d) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2003, which requires that upon request from a U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem the Secretary of State must record “Israel” as the place of birth on the individual’s passport. Oral arguments are scheduled for the fall. The case has generated a lot of interesting commentary, the most impressive of which is a pair of law review articles (here and here) by Robert Reinstein, who uses textual and historical analysis to argue that the President shares the recognition power with Congress. In this post, I want to sketch out an alternative view that grants substantial recognition powers exclusively to the President while also making sense of Professor Reinstein’s historical research. As I understand it, Reinstein’s argument goes like this: First, claims of executive exclusivity must meet a heavy burden of persuasion because plenary executive power is contrary to the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. Second, the claim of an exclusively executive power over recognition fails to meet this burden—the plain text of the Constitution offers no support, evidence of original meaning is silent, and post-ratification history suggests, if anything, that the political branches hold the recognition power concurrently. Congress thus shares authority to recognize foreign states and governments. Reinstein focuses more on defeating the idea of plenary executive power than identifying the affirmative source of a concurrent power in Article I, but he notes that Congress’s authority to declare war, regulate foreign commerce, and enact necessary and proper legislation creates an implied basis for congressional recognition. In laying out an alternative view, I want to suggest first that it’s important to be precise about what “recognition” means. International law of course differentiates between the recognition of states and governments, and between recognition de jure and de facto. With de jure recognition of a state, the United States expresses that a given political unit qualifies as a state under international law and thus holds the rights and obligations that accompany statehood, including the right to invoke sovereign immunity and the act of state doctrine as defenses in court. De jure recognition of a government, by contrast, is acknowledgment of a foreign government as the depository of a state’s sovereignty. This kind of recognition signals a general willingness to enter into normal diplomatic relations and facilitate the government’s exercise of the state’s sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States. Finally, de facto recognition also entails a willingness to carry on official relations, but without necessarily saying anything about the particular form those relations will take. One can de facto recognize a foreign government, for example, without exchanging ambassadors or providing its leaders with immunity from suit. (For a more extensive discussion, see the work of Stefan Talmon.)
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29 Apr

AJIL Unbound, the new on-line companion to the American Journal of International Law, has begun to publish short essays this week for its on-line Agora, The End of Treaties? (see the original call for papers here). So far, they have posts up by Tim Meyer ('Collective Decision-making in International Governance') -- and Joel Trachtman ('Reports of the Death of Treaty...

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28 Apr

I've been remiss in my blogging lately for a variety of reasons, but I can't let pass two interrelated decisions by Pre-Trial Chamber II (sitting as a single judge) in the criminal proceedings against Aimé Kilolo Musamba and Jean-Jacques Mangenda Kabongo -- Bemba's lead defence attorney and case manager, respectively. The two men, who are currently in custody, are accused of...

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28 Apr

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa South Africa is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its first ever all-race, democratic election that ended decades of racial oppression under the apartheid system. International mediators have called on South Sudan's rebel leader to meet his rival President Salva Kiir to prevent an ethnic-fuelled conflict turning into a...

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28 Apr

Last week's NETmundial conference serves as a reminder of just how much the nature of cyberspace remains (at least theoretically) undetermined.  We still can't agree on what kind of resource cyberspace "is":  Is it a global public good as Sir Tim Berners Lee proclaimed (i.e., a res communis) or just a collection of technology subject to sovereignty regulation like so...

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27 Apr

Call for Proposals Call for Proposals: "Differentiated integration inside and outside the EU: taking stock and charting the future." Please send the proposals for the ECSA Conference of the Swiss, Austrian and German Branch to be held on 23/24 October 2014 at the University of Lausanne's IDHEAP within the Facultyo of Law, Criminal Sciences and Administration to conference@ecsaswiss.ch no later than June...

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26 Apr

This week on Opinio Juris, we teamed up with EJIL:Talk! to bring you a transatlantic symposium on Karen Alter's book The New Terrain of International Law. You can find Karen's introduction to her book here, followed by comments by Tonya Putnam, Roger Alford and Jacob Katz Cogan. Karen's reply is here. Other guests this week were Paula Gaeta who explained why she is not convinced by...

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25 Apr

Thanks to Steve Vladeck for his thoughtful response to my critique of his paper posted earlier this week. In great sum, Steve has a paper out proposing that the United States hold the remaining Gitmo detainees in the United States under a domestic immigration detention statute to ease the way for Congress to repeal the AUMF statute (under...

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25 Apr

[Karen J Alter is Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University and co-direcor at iCourts Center of Excellence at the Copenhagen University Faculty of Law.] Thanks so much to Tonya Putnam, Roger Alford, and Jacob Katz Cogan for their thoughtful commentaries.  I appreciate their kind words, and their comments reflect one of my hopes for this book; that it will be a springboard for researching new and important questions about international courts and international law. I want to respond while echoing some of the questions they raise. My starting point for The New Terrain of International Law was the following question:  If the ‘problem’ of international law is its lack of enforceability, then how does making the law enforceable affect the influence of international law? I cut into this very big question by focusing on a new set of institutions that were designed to address the enforceability gap in international law.  The comments in this symposium push upon a number of choices I made as I then tried to make the project tractable. My first choice was to focus on the universe of permanent international courts, co-opting the definition of an IC created by the Project on International Courts and Tribunals (PICT). Alford’s commentary openly worries that others will follow me in focusing on PICT courts. I share this concern, which is why I discuss the limits of relying on PICT’s definition (p.70-77). For me, the most arbitrary part of the definition is its focus on permanent ICs. I decided to nonetheless catalogue permanent ICs because sticking to a plausible definition ensured that I was examining like institutions. Another related question I sometimes get is why I include ICs that exist but have no cases. This is where the benefits of PICT’s definition arise.  We can see from my universe that permanence is neither necessary nor sufficient for IC effectiveness, and we can start to examine why like institutions have varied impact.  This is a topic that Laurence Helfer and I have pursued through our in depth research on the Andean Court and on Africa’s ICs. I am already moving beyond PICT’s definition, as should we all. The New Terrain of International Law demonstrates the arbitrariness of focusing on permanent ICs by including as case-studies non-permanent bodies. The NAFTA case study, for example, discusses how the “permanent” WTO system proved no more able than the NAFTA system to address complaints about illegal US countervailing duties. The Chapter 5 discussion of the ICJ’s role in the Bahrain-Qatar dispute, and the same court’s ineffectiveness in resolving US-Iranian disputes, shows again that being a permanent IC, with preappointed judges and the jurisdiction to issue binding rulings, still does not necessarily improve IC effectiveness. Another step in moving beyond PICT’s definition is that Chapter 1 of the new Oxford Handbook on International Adjudication, which I co-authored with the author of PICT’s definition, Cesare Romano, excludes permanence from the definition of “adjudicatory bodies.” A second choice was to use structured case studies as the mode of investigating how the existence of an IC contributes (or not) to changes in state behavior in the direction indicated by the law.  Nico Krisch addresses indirectly my case-study choice in his reply on EJIL:Talk!
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25 Apr

To all doctoral students and early career academics or professionals who would like to contribute to our blog in July or August, remember that applications for our second Emerging Voices symposium are still open until May 1. We'd love to hear from you! More information is here....

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24 Apr

Over the last two decades, the key policy question surrounding multilateral sanctions has been effectiveness. Because of studies that suggest that sanctions are effective only about one-third of the time, there has been a concerted effort to develop so-called “smart sanctions,” which increase the effectiveness of Security Council sanctions at the front end by targeting specific groups, individuals, and entities....

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