Weekend Roundup: November 16-22, 2014

Over the past week on Opinio Juris, we again enjoyed a lot of different perspectives from our guest bloggers, beginning with Rob Howse, whom Kristen introduced as this week’s featured guest blogger. He highlighted the return of neo-conservativism in Washington, reminded us of Alexandre Kojève’s being a neglected figure in the history of international law and also discussed the breakthrough at recent WTO talks and the trade facilitation agreement this week. He also posted on Liam Murphy’s book What Makes International Law Law?

Additionally, we heard from S. I. Strong announcing that the preliminary results from a recent empirical study on international commercial mediation and conciliation are now available.

Nicolás Carrillo-Santarelli talked about the most recent events in Colombia with the negotiations between the government and FARC rebels being suspended due to the and the kidnapping under IHL, including discussion around the illegality of deprivations of liberty, which sparked quite an intellectual debate in the comments.

A post also came in from Andrea Pin on the Italian Constitutional Court, the International Court of Justice and German war crimes. Duncan French and Jean d’Aspremont co-blogged on the ILC project on the identification of customary international law in summary of the two-day expert level seminar hosted by Lincoln Law School and the Manchester International Law Center.

Roger wrote up his analysis on the Ninth Circuit’s muddled comity analysis in Mujica v. Airscan while Kevin worked out some of his thoughts on the baffling Comoros decision and introduced a new videogame challenging the player to survive as long as possible as a civilian in a war-torn fictional city. Additionally, he introduced and congratulated the newly minted Dr. Mark Kersten.

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

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