In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Cesare Romano

09 Dec

[Cesare Romano is Professor of Law, Joseph W. Ford Fellow, and Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. He is also Senior Research Fellow of iCourts, University of Copenhagen, and of Pluricourts, University of Oslo.] Last September, the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, and Timoleón Jiménez, the top commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces...

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31 Oct

One of my favorite Greek mythology stories is the one of Uranus and Cronus. As the ancestor of all gods of the Pantheon, Uranus for a long time had no rivals. He was the personification of the sky and the mate of Gaia (the Earth). Their children were the Titans. Since Uranus was jealous of the future power of his...

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27 Oct

The reason I did not blog in the past few days is that I have been stuck in a most interesting discussion about whether there can be any place for human rights considerations in the WTO (see below Vietnam Wins Invitation to Join the WTO and The WTO...

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26 Oct

Yesterday I got in the mail this month’s issue of Wired. I love that magazine. It is great entertainment but one that keeps my brain cells alight and it is forward looking, always looking for the latest trend, the next, and the one after the next. Anyway, in it there was this little chart, mapping out lingo in natural sciences....

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24 Oct

For almost two centuries, rationality has been a central postulate of social sciences. There are various ways to determine whether a certain behavior is “rational”, but, in general and at least since Enlightenment, we think one is acting “rationally” if one tries to maximize one’s own “utility”. Like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, this highly rational being, the homo economicus, free from...

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22 Oct

A few days ago I had a very lively discussion with a senior disarmament specialist, someone involved for quite a long time with efforts to stop nuclear proliferation. Of course, the North Korean nuclear test was the spark. It was the classical discussion where one sees the glass half-full and the other half-empty. He claimed that the North Korean blast...

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20 Oct

I will abuse of the posting privileges I was given on Opinio Juris for two weeks to make sure everyone has a chance to see this comment that was posted by Peter Prows to my posting "Shallow International Law can't Protect the Deep Sea" For the record, I never quite bought the disctinction between academia and activism. We are all...

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20 Oct

The cold war ended fifteen years ago. However, in the case of international human rights law it looks like it never did. The International Bill of Human Rights still bears allover the marks of the struggle between liberalism and communism. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, in many regards, an extraordinary document. It was the first, and unfortunately the...

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18 Oct

There is always a topic du jour in international law, a subject that defines a season of international law. Between the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, it was the law of the sea. Between the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, it was international environmental law. Between the mid-1990s to present, it has been international criminal law. Every season is brought about by a major international...

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16 Oct

These days the UN General Assembly is discussing the adoption of a declaration calling for an immediate moratorium on deep-sea bottom trawl fishing on the high seas, at least until legally-binding regimes for the effective conservation and management of fisheries and the protection of biodiversity on the high seas can be developed, implemented and enforced. The measure has been proposed...

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