Professor Kenneth Anderson announced yesterday that he's taking a break from blogging over at his Law of War and Just War Theory Blog. Although he says he'll continue to post occasionally, the tenor of the message certainly sounds like a good-bye. I'm saddened by that news. I've never met Professor Anderson, but his was one of the...
My former State Department colleagues, David Bowker of WilmerHale, and David Kaye who just recently moved to UCLA, published an Op-Ed in the NY Times this past weekend. For those of you (like me) who missed it initially, check out this sampling of their Harper's Index-like spin on GTMO Facts in advance of the Court's consideration of Boumediene v....
Surely, we can come up with a funnier list of treaties than this. Or, perhaps not. As I first noted on joining Opinio Juris, international law jokes are far and few between. Of course, given my initial foray into that arena, I'm not sure I'm well suited to changing this fact. But, perhaps some of our...
Wow! Like Marty Lederman, I really thought this story was from The Onion. But, it now appears that the Acting Head of OLC, Dan Levin, volunteered to undergo waterboarding in an effort to inform his legal opinion as to what qualifies as “torture.” On the one hand, I think this is another useful reminder that many who’ve...
I recently finished teaching Hartford Fire again. And it got me pondering Justice Scalia’s curious attitudes towards international and foreign law. Scalia’s hostility to the use of foreign legal norms in interpreting the U.S. Constitution is well-established. As far back as Thompson v. Oklahoma in 1988 we see Scalia critique "The plurality's reliance upon Amnesty International's account of...
Will it be a Happy Halloween for fans of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNLCOS)? I'm guessing yes. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee appears poised to report out the treaty favorably for a full Senate vote on giving advice and consent to U.S. accession to the treaty. You can listen to...
Since I last raised negotiations over the EU Reform Treaty, the Europeans have kept themselves quite busy. Early in October, lawyers agreed to a text. Then on October 18-19, the EU Council of Ministers hammered out a few last minute changes to the deal (e.g., moving the updated Charter of Human Rights into a side document) and setting...
Well, not actually moving it, so much as opening a branch in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates. Following in the tradition of the Guggenheim, which now has five locations worldwide, with a sixth planned for Abu Dhabi, the French Government has concluded an international agreement with the UAE Government for the opening of a museum with...
The Intlawgrrls bloggers have given up on their experiment with blogging under pseudonyms. The details are here. Notwithstanding that the pseudonyms had an initial educational value--highlighting the contributions of various historical figures--the fact that the postings were not truly anonymous always had me trying to click through to identify a post's actual author. As such, I...
For those who've not yet heard enough about Medellin, the transcript is now available here. I've only had time to give it a quick glance, but thought I'd pass on my initial reactions and open the door for other comments. I guess what's most interesting about the argument was what didn't happen; although touched tangentially, the argument spent...
Today's LA Times has an op-ed I wrote arguing that states need to tailor the law of war and the prohibition on the use of force to cyberspace. This is a shorter version of a piece I posted on SSRN a few months ago (more details here). I'm still working on a longer, law-review length treatment now so...
What? You thought the Korean War ended fifty years ago? Actually, the Panmunjom Agreement, concluded on June 27, 1953, was merely an armistice agreement. It provided for a cease-fire and created a military demarcation line between North and South Korea. It did not, however, provide any terms for normalizing relations among the participants, which is what a...
