Michael Goldhaber at the Amlaw Daily is unconvinced.  Drawing from some of the data discussed at last week’s ASIL-Harvard Law School conference on Globalization of the Legal Profession, Golhaber summarizes the presentations at HLS, crunches the numbers, and looks at the dangers lurking (or already arrived) for firms staking their futures on emerging markets:

James Jones, who chairs the Hildebrandt Institute, cited Citi Private Bank data from earlier this year, drawn from about seventy law firms that do their banking with Citi. These data for the first time show that global law firms (which they define as firms with at least a quarter of their lawyers outside their home jurisdiction) were outperforming their rivals. However, as Jones admitted, as the meltdown goes global, it may only be a matter of time before the data shows every firm bottoming out.

We’re with Jones on his afterthought. If one thing has emerged in the past month, it is that emerging markets will not save the world economy. We don’t mean to be a rude guest, but two institutions that have learned that lesson hard are Harvard University (whose endowment has lost big emerging market bets) and Citigroup Inc. . . .

The Asian Society of International Law announces the “Second Biennial General Conference of the Asian Society of International Law,” at the University of Tokyo, August 1-2, 2009, which takes up the important issue of Asia’s relationship with the international legal order under the main theme of “International Law in a Multi-polar and Multi-civilizational World – Asian Perspectives, Challenges and Contributions.”

The Organizing Committee cordially invites paper proposals and/or submissions for the event and has posted guidelines for proposals for papers, panels, discussant papers and agora papers. All presentations will be in English and all papers not in English must be accompanied by an English language translation. Speakers must be members of the Asian Society (membership in the Asian Society is free until April 2009.)  The conference organizers are interested in participation by both academics and practitioners.

The deadline for panel proposals is December 31, 2008; the deadline for papers for “regular” panels is January 31, 2009; and the deadline for discussant papers in the plenary session and agorae papers is February 28, 2009.

Thanks to my ASIL Insights Co-editor Amy Porges for passing along this information.

The celebrations in Africa (in particular in Obama’s father’s homeland of Kenya, where scores of newborns have been named Barack or Michelle) have left some introspective:  Why has democracy continued to evolve and progress is the U.S., but not here?  Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch links to this letter to the editor from the Guardian in Lagos, Nigeria:

 

What has happened in United States of America is in total contrast to what continues to happen in Africa and Nigeria, the most populous black nation in the world. 

The Black world still represents a place where political opportunities are not open to all; where godfatherism in politics thrives; where the people’s votes do not count; where ethnicity still defines the trends in politics; where there is no transparency and accountability in government, and where anyone who calls and crusades for change, is seen as an enemy of the State rather than a patriot…

If we must be like America, we must begin to make sacrifices for our country by putting aside mundane considerations like friendships, tribal ties, consanguinal relationships, financial inducements, and at all times be ready to fight for social justice, equality of all parts of the country, accountability and transparency in government and most importantly, free and fair elections. At the end, we may be able to say like the Americans “Yes We Can!”

As Peter notes here, yesterday’s historic election felt, in many ways, like a global election. Measured by how the election affects the lives of people around the world, it is not too much of an exaggeration. For months, pundits have also seized on the overwhelming global support of Obama as evidence that his election – in and of itself – will strengthen the U.S. position internationally. It is worth taking some time to think about at least four reasons why an Obama presidency will enhance the soft power of the United States:  (1) the importance of not being George W. Bush; (2) the importance of not being a Baby Boomer; (3) the importance of being the first African-American elected to the presidency; (4) the importance of being Barack Obama. . . .

I have been a big fan of Andrew Sullivan’s writing for a couple of decades (since his TNR days), and have read his blog pretty regularly for the past four years.  He has an interesting essay up at The Atlantic’s newly redesigned site, “Why I Blog.” From the intro:

This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.

Solo blogs are a different beast from group blogs; reported blogs different from academic blogs.  But the recognition that the medium changes the way we think and write   and the way we think about writing  applies to those of us who do this as a small part of a larger job just as much to those who blog full-time.  And for at least a few hours each week, we live within this world created by the blogosphere; not quite a conversation, but not quite deep reading either.

His video conversation with Marc Ambinder (a political reporter/blogger) on the subject of blogging is also worth watching. I would be interested to know how OJ readers view the world of blogs circa 2008.

For interested readers, our friend and colleague Bobby Ahdieh sends along the following information about fellowships with the Princeton University Program in Law and Public Affairs.  The fellows program has typically hosted at least one or two public international law scholars (several of them are OJ alums!).  Past fellows rave about the experience — the time to focus on a longer project, the interdisciplinary approach to public law issues, and the opportunity to engage an audience beyond the legal community.  The deadline for applications for 2009-2010 academic year is November 3.  Here’s an excerpt from the website:

Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs (”LAPA”) explores the role of law in constituting politics, society, the economy and culture. LAPA participants are engaged in the study of law both in the present and over time, not only in the US, but also in countries around the world and across national borders. Each year, LAPA brings to Princeton a select group of residential fellows and occasional visitors drawn from the academy, legal practice, government, and policy-making institutions. They join a collection of professors on Princeton’s permanent faculty who draw upon diverse methodologies to investigate legal phenomena. By combining the multidisciplinary expertise of Princeton’s faculty with knowledge and perspectives provided by leading academic and practical experts on the law, the Program in Law and Public Affairs has created an exciting new forum for teaching and research about the legal technologies and institutions needed to address the complex problems of the new century.

Friends and readers of Opinio Juris pass along the following conference announcements from Southern Methodist University/Dedman Law School (11/7: “The Rise of Transnational Networks”) and Washburn University Law School (11/13-14 “Rule of Law and the Global War on Terrorism: Detainees, Interrogations, and Military Commissions”).  They both look terrific (one even features a OJ blogger and several OJ alums!) so check them out if you can.  More details:

Professor Elena Baylis hosted a really terrific workshop on socio-legal approaches to international law at the University of Pittsburgh last week.  Elena has a blog post up at Intlawgrrls that explains how the workshop came to be.  As one of the law professors in a group that was split evenly between anthropologists and legal scholars, I learned a lot about anthropological methods (in particular, ethnographic research and some of the debates within anthropology about what makes a particular study an ethnography) and was struck by the significant differences between how law schools and anthropology departments assess and value scholarship and knowledge creation.  These differences create strong disincentives for collaboration — particularly pre-tenure.  Elena notes in her post that one of the drivers behind the workshop and the Collaborative Research Network on Human Rights (itself is an interdisciplinary project under the aegis of Law & Society) is the need to expand opportunities for collaboration across disciplines in empirical scholarship.  The workshop participants seemed in large agreement that empirical work needs to be understood beyond quantitative methods to include a variety of qualitative empirical methods. (Just when did “empirical” as currently used in the legal academy come to be a shorthand for quantitative analysis?)  But to what end?  Why do international lawyers do empirical scholarship?

Almost a decade ago, Tom Friedman famously scoffed at the idea of a “Microsoft Navy” defending the shipping lanes of the Pacific.  But technology has a way of moving us in unforeseen directions, raising the possibility not just of aggressive cyberwarfare, but of cyber-defense forces.  So, when hackers (allegedly Russian in origin) took down Civil.ge, the official English-language official Georgian news cite, Georgia turned to Google Blogspot to host the site, counting on the (almost always) reliable Google servers and security firewalls to keep out the cyberenemy. It is an interesting twist on both privatization of government functions and asymetric warfare, demonstrating how off-the-shelf products can be particularly helpful for a “cyberlocked” country like Georgia. As the Wired blog reports:

“In a sense,” notes Jim Stogdill, “they must be saying ‘we can’t keep our sites up, but we don’t think [Russian hackers] can take down Blogspot, given Google’s much better infrastructure and ability to defend it.’”

“Another interesting aspect is seeing how certain countries are what I call ‘cyberlocked,’” cybersecurity veteran Richard Bejtlich tells Danger Room. “We know a land-locked country has no access to the sea.  Countries like .ge [Georgia] might rely too heavily on one or a handful of connections, potentially through hostile countries (eg, .ru [Russia]), for their physical connectivity. As a result, an adversary can control their network access to the outside world. A diagram from the Packet Clearing House, shows Georgia’s network dilemma.

Meanwhile, Estonia (once the victim of Russian-based hackers) is now hosting Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. And “in a historic first, Estonia is sending cyberdefense advisors to Georgia,” Network World observes.

I have had the distinct pleasure of spending my spring and summer as a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. SAIS offers a program of studies in international law and organizations (something only a handful of other public policy/political science graduate programs in the the U.S. can boast about), with a full range of courses in public international law and international economic regulations. And, at a time when China is the place to be, Johns Hopkins can proudly claim to have been on the ground in China for over two decades. The SAIS Center in Nanjing is currently looking for talented law professors — in particular international and comparative law specialists — to teach in China during the 2009-2010 academic year. Full information about this great opportunity and the application process is here.

I will join the chorus of praise for this terrific book. But I want to add briefly to Peter’s critique of Ben’s premise that the current threat from transnational terrorism has us in a “long war,” by looking at what this means for broader foreign policy – one that encompasses, but it is not driven by, domestic legal policy. The book correctly, and refreshingly, recognizes two important points: (1) that addressing the threat of terrorism requires approaches that encompass domestic law enforcement and regulation as well as applications of armed force and multitude of other cooperative intelligence and military operations; and (2) that this hybrid policy approach has been – and continues to be – the hallmark of U.S. counterterrorism policy since at least the Regan administration. (I hope we can all finally retire the well-worn line of the Bush administration that “the problem with prior administrations was that they viewed terrorism purely as a law enforcement problem.”) Given those important admissions, what is the rationale to adopt the framing of counterterrorism policy as a “long war with a dangerous foe?” (p. 17)…

I was struck by this piece tucked away in today’s Washington Post, noting that Pat Kennedy, Under Secretary for Management at the State Department, had to remind diplomatic personnel in Germany that they were prohibited from attending Barack Obama’s speech today in Berlin.  It is a mark of just how unprecedented Obama’s current overseas visit is, mixing as it does official travel as a U.S. Senator with travel that is funded and staffed by his campaign.  When I was in the Foreign Service, I never had to face this question. (I worked on President Clinton’s 1994 state visit to Berlin – which included a speech at the Brandenburg Gate.)  The general rule for U.S. personnel overseas is an absolute prohibition on partisan activities.  As explained in the article, the Hatch Act restrictions that apply to U.S. Government personnel stateside are more permissive than the Foreign Affairs Manual’s prohibition:

AFSA [American Foreign Service Association] representatives met with Kennedy and State Department legal representatives Tuesday after two unnamed embassy employees complained to the union that the prohibition — in an internal statement issued after some stationed there had asked about attending the rally — violated their civil rights.

Kennedy cited section 4123.3 of the third volume of the lengthy manual of personnel regulations for the Foreign Service, which says: “A U.S. citizen employee, spouse, or family member shall not engage in partisan political activities abroad.”

In the interview, Kennedy described the regulation as “a standing policy,” although he acknowledged that “I don’t believe we’ve ever had to interpret this before. None of us thinking about this could come up with a precedent” for the Obama campaign rally.

He said that despite the manual’s prohibition on “spouses and family members,” the departmental interpretation was that only Foreign Service members were barred from attending the event.

Given that last comment permitting family members to attend, and the fact that German nationals employed by the embassy are not under the same prohibition as US citizen employees, the diplomatic personnel. . .

Past and current presidents of the American Society of International Law today urged leaders in Congress to take legislative action to comply with the ICJ decision in Avena and halt the executions of Jose Medellin and the other affected death row inmates until the review required by the ICJ has been carried out.  Full text of the letter is here. So, readers, is Peter Spiro right in predicting that Jose Medellin will live out his days in prison (but also wrong in predicting that it won’t be because of congressional action)?

I am thrilled to report that our friend and colleague Janet Levit has been named the new dean at the University of Tulsa Law School.  Janet is an accomplished international law scholar and has proven her considerable management skills as the interim dean at Tulsa since last fall.  She is also an alum of Opinio Juris, and a warm and supportive colleague and collaborator.  I have no doubt that she will achieve the ambitious goals she has set out for the school.  She joins a growing roster of internationalists who have taken the helm at law schools in the past few years — including Paul Berman who moves to the deanship at Arizona State University Law School this summer, and David Wippman who is the new dean at the University of Minnesota Law School.  Congratulations to Janet on her appointment!  Here is the full press release from Tulsa.

In conjunction with the announcement of our new partnership with Oxford University Press, Opinio Juris is pleased to roll out our redesigned site. A lot of hard work has gone into the redesign and we want to thank Seth Elalouf of Spacesuit Group Design for his technical and design support during our migration to a new hosting platform and graphical interface, and Amy Moore for her invaluable assistance troubleshooting links and content. The entire Opinio Juris crew also thanks Ninell Silberberg and Niamh Cunningham at Oxford University Press for their tremendous support and dedication to this project…

Before I offer my initial thoughts about the “Between the Wars,” it is only fair that I join Ken in disclosing my own biases. I joined the Foreign Service the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and left the State Department at the beginning of the second Clinton term. My final post, fittingly enough, was in Berlin. In Washington, I served two stints on the Seventh Floor of the State Department (the location of senior management for the unitiated): one at the Operations Center (the 24-hour crisis center at State) during the last year of the George H.W. Bush administration and another as a Special Assistant to Warren Christopher (beginning on “day one” of the Clinton administration). You could say my service spanned the “interwar” years Chollet and Goldgeier discuss in their book. I was thus particularly interested to read a history of the events that I experienced from inside State, and also to see how the authors portrayed certain key players. (I had to chuckle at their characterization of the lanky southerner Bob Oakley –for whom I worked when he was Ambassador to Pakistan — as “the rugged [!]career diplomat” (p. 77).)

As with any history that tries to cover as many people and events as this ambitious book does, there is much that is lost – both in terms of events and nuance – to space constraints. I don’t mean this as a criticism of the authors’ considerable achievement in covering as much as they do in the space of one book. A thorough diplomatic history of the period, even one focused only on U.S. diplomacy, would require much more breadth and depth than the authors are constrained to here, including much more discussion of the many counterparts to the U.S. policy makers in foreign capitals and within international organizations. That quibble aside, the authors do a terrific job of capturuing what was truly remarkable about the years 1989-2001: the magnitude and breakneck speed of events. (Not suprisingly, perhaps, they both spent time on the Clinton foreign policy team.)

For those who lived through the early 1990s inside the foreign policy machinery, as the book accurately captures, the pace of events was simply breathtaking. The end of the Warsaw Pact, the dissolution of the USSR and the creation of a dozen or so new states in the space of just one year (1991) meant not only thinking about the “big ideas,” but, perhaps more important – and more daunting — handling the details: establishing new embassies; training diplomats; forging new military partnerships and relationships; rethinking our foreign humanitarian assistance; expanding the Peace Corps into states previously off limits, etc. On the international law side, international criminal law went from an historical artifact to a living legal regime; trade regimes created new and more robust dispute resolution mechanisms. The 1990s witnessed explosive growth, both in membership and missions, of the various international and regional economic, military, political and legal institutions – WTO, NAFTA, EU, APEC, ICTY, ICTR (and later the ICC) All these shifts required fundamental reorganization of the mechanics of our national security apparatus and rethinking about the spaces left open by vacuum of Cold War politics in a range of geopolitical and economic contexts. This work of bureacratic restructuring started under the Bush administration, picked up pace during the Clinton years and continued thorughout the current administration.

One might ask whether the bureaucracy matters and how it is connected to the intellectual history of the period. I believe it matters quite a bit, and will be of central importance to the next administration. It is one thing, for example, to present a theory of “soft power” as Joe Nye has done. It is quite another to figure out how to turn theory into action, to fund it, manage it and keep tabs on whether its exercise has achieved the desired results. (If we ‘ve learned anything from the disasters of the neocons, surely it is that competence matters.) The same, of course, can be said of change to the intelligence and military bureaucracies. Chollet and Goldgeier briefly discuss the challenges the post-Cold War changes brought to the CIA (pp. 261 -262), but largely gloss over the diplomatic restructuring debates of the early 1990s, including, e.g., the reintegration of USIA, USAID and ACDA into State. Execution – including the myriad little things — of diplomacy matters; errors in execution are not unique to intelligence and military operations.

One of the authors’ central claims [Myth Five] is that the post-11/9 era was not amenable to one unifying theory akin to containment. I strongly agree. Indeed, as the authors note, this idea that there is no simplifying (in Kennan’s words) “bumper sticker” to define the post-Cold War era has been kicking around since the day the Berlin Wall fell. (Perhaps the myth of a unifying theme appealed only to the vanity of a few foreign policy wonks!) But if that is true, why does the book keep circling back to the idea that either Bush I or Clinton “failed” in defining this new era and spend so much time on the public intellectuals and journalists who were so keen on putting their own label on this not-to-be-labeled era? (see, e.g., p. 27“[Bush] was unable to translate [the End of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War] momentous achievements into a direction for his country….no one had assumed Kennan’s mantle as the country’s grand strategist.” p. 84: “With a disastrous first year in office, Clinton had lost the initiative to define the era.”) Put differently, why were many of the players portrayed in the book so obsessed with coming up with a label? If labels matter, as many in Washington clearly believe they do, why do they matter? (I have my own view on this, but am curious to hear what the authors think.) I wonder whether the book’s focus on the inside-the-beltway political and foreign policy establishment misses some of the broader trends of the 1990s that were occurring outside of Washington and beyond U.S. borders, but which nonetheless have had profound impact on our current foreign policy posture. More on that in my next post.