Surely one of the great things about a career in international law is the travel. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have found a profession that afforded me opportunities to visit (or even live in) a diverse set of destinations, whether it was Nairobi or Geneva, Buenos Aires or Jakarta, Osaka or St. Petersburg, and, yes, even Doha in the summer (and...
The American Society of International Law has an active International Economic Law (IEL) Interest Group. Most notably, it holds a biennial conference geared to a common IEL theme, with the papers presented then collected and published in some form, including THE POLITICS OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC LAW, Tomer Broude, Amy Porges and Marc L. Busch eds., Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2010);...
I'm interrupting my current teaching assignment in Rome (a tough gig I know) to flag for reader's the U.S. Supreme Court's decision today in Samantar v. Yousef (see here). As Julian noted in an earlier post, the question before the Court in this case was whether the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) immunized foreign government officials for their official acts. For human rights...
The U.S. Supreme Court handed down its first-ever international family law opinion today in Abbott v. Abbott. You can access the decision here. In short, a 6-3 majority (authored by Justice Kennedy) found that the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction treats ne exeat rights (that is, rights to consent before the other parent takes the child...
Australia's government has announced that Australia will accede to the COE Cybercrime Convention (and not, as many are reporting that it will merely "sign" the Convention, which, I suppose, reflects the media's continued inability or unwillingness to sort out the basic issues of treaty formation). With Australian accession, the COE Cybercrime Convention will have 27 states parties. It remains the only cyber-specific multilateral treaty out there. And...
My colleague David Post and I have an op-ed in today's National Law Journal. In it, we challenge the sufficiency of existing responses to cyberattacks, whether in terms of pushing for heightened security, more criminal law enforcement or applying the laws of war (if applicable). Criminal law (and the laws of war for that matter) depends on identifying and holding...
Harold Koh's ASIL speech drew lots of attention for his defense of the legality of U.S. use of aerial drones. But Koh also spent much of the speech explaining and defending the U.S. decision to reorient its relationship toward the International Criminal Court. He noted U.S. attendance (as an observer) at the ICC Assembly of States Parties in November, and U.S....
Today, U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR) officially released its 2011 rankings of American law schools. This, in turn, led the legal blogosphere into its annual love-hate dance with the "overall" rankings--pouring over every move up or down the ladder, while simultaneously denouncing the ranking's methodology and utility. Lest our readers feel left out, I thought I'd flag the "new" International Law rankings that...
Putting aside events in Kyrgyzstan (which certainly bear close watching), the day's big news for international lawyers was President Obama and Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev signing two related international agreements on the reduction of nuclear armaments. The State Department has posted the originals of this new START treaty here (see here for the longer, more detailed Protocol to that...
I figure it's never too late to catch up on some of last week's April 1 reporting. The Harvard Law Record got a great "scoop" with this story: Speaking to a lunch seminar held by the National Security Law Association, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was shocked to discover that the term “self-executing”...
A quick note for interested readers -- the Texas Law Review has just published my latest article, Unpacking the Compact Clause. They've posted a copy of it here as well. My own abstract of the piece follows. The Compact Clause prohibits U.S. states from making “any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power” absent congressional consent. No one, however, has ever...
I thought ASIL and the program organizers did a wonderful job with this year's Annual Meeting. I particularly appreciated the opportunity to chair a panel, War and Law in Cyberspace. In addition to a discussion of the technological capacities of cyberattacks and how they map onto the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, we had a good discussion of what...
