The June 2008 issue of Esquire magazine has a feature piece on John Yoo by John H. Richardson, plus an on-line transcript of part of Richardson's interview and an autobiographical sketch by Yoo himself. Although framed as a cautionary tale, the article clearly seeks to humanize Yoo. The reader gets a view of Yoo the professor, questioning...
Jose Ernesto Medellin is scheduled for execution by the state of Texas on August 5, 2008. If one assumes that Executive Branch officials have an interest in trying to find new ways to comply with the Avena decision (an open question I know), that does not leave them much time. From my perspective, the Executive Branch has two,...
Check out this article from Sunday's Washington Post. It describes a lawsuit by a company employee alledgedly waterboarded by his supervisor and sales teammates as part of a team-building exercise. Even though both the supervisor and the victim/employee disclaim any knowledge that they were involved in waterboarding, the whole event frightens me on multiple levels. First off,...
John Yoo now has his own song courtesy of Harry Shearer's Le Show. It's probably not a song he or those who support him will like with its chorus of "Who is Yoo . . . Torture Memo Man." And, I suspect they'll dismiss it entirely, given its very liberal source. Still, regardless of how you feel...
It's not often that an NPR show features treaties, but last week, Ira Glass of This American Life, had a fascinating story about the US-Canada International Boundary Commission (listen to Act 1). In short, he recounts a fight between a Bush-appointed commissioner Dennis Schornack and the Justice Department over the application of a series of treaties between the United...
At the request of the chairs of the ASIL International Economic Law Interest Group (Amy Porges and Tomer Broude), I'm posting the following about the Group's upcoming activities: Readers of the blog who will be in Washington on April 10 are invited to the annual business meeting of the International Economic Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law,...
Much of the attention on Medellin has (rightly to my mind) focused on the Court’s definition of a non-self-executing treaty and its method for finding the 3 treaties at issue—the VCCR Optional Protocol, the ICJ Statute and Article 94 of the U.N. Charter—to be non-self-executing. Whatever the more general implications of the Court’s method with respect to a presumption...
The wide-ranging responses to Oona’s work are a testament to its ambition and importance. In the interest of keeping the discussion manageable, I’d like to offer two additional comments on Oona’s piece even though I could easily pursue a half dozen other lines of inquiry. First, I wanted to comment on the subtitle of the article—“The Past, Present and...
First off, let me thank Oona Hathaway and our guest bloggers for contributing to what is turning into a highly useful discussion of the relative merits of Article II treaties vs. congressional-executive agreements. Oona's work is ambitious and provocative, seeking to marshal comparative, historical, and normative arguments in favor of (largely) discontinuing the Article II treaty-making process. Some...
It's now been five months since the Court heard oral argument in Medellin v. Texas and yet Medellin is still waiting to learn his fate. There's already been much speculation about where the Court will go, some favorable to Texas' argument that the President lacked the power to direct Texas' court system to review and reconsider Medellin's conviction and...
William J. Haynes II, DOD General Counsel, is stepping down from his position in March. The DOD Press Release is here. Haynes, played a critical role in decisions surrounding the application of the Geneva Conventions to detainees, the use of GTMO as a detention facility, as well as the interrogation standards to be employed there and elsewhere. ...
Last year, I participated in a symposium at Lewis & Clark Law School--Crimes, War Crimes and the War on Terror. The symposium edition of the Lewis & Clark Law Review (vol. 11) containing the resulting essays is now out. Here's the line-up: John R. Kroger & John T. Parry, Introduction Kelly Moore, The Role of Federal Criminal Prosecutions in the...
