I had a good day yesterday. I received a package in the mail from Oxford containing copies of my book -- The Oxford Guide to Treaties. It represents the culmination of a three year effort on my part to compile a comprehensive and current guide to treaty law and practice. To do this, I started with a fairly simple premise...
As summer winds down, I'm beginning to look ahead to the coming semester in which I'll be teaching public international law after a couple of years' hiatus. As a result, I've spent the week, re-working my syllabus (and thanking Ecuador for giving me a wonderfully topical way to start off the class). Beyond current events, however, I've once again spent...
Not likely it seems. The tragic shootings in Aurora, Colorado may be responsible for moving President Obama to talk about gun control as he did yesterday in New Orleans, despite a noticeable earlier reticence to engage that topic. But that speech was clearly aimed at a domestic audience, emphasizing a need for improved domestic regulations and responses to gun violence....
Our own Chris Borgen recently did an interview about Opinio Juris on a New York City Cable Show, Today's Verdict. You can watch it here. Chris talks about the origins of the blog, past successes and our more recent work (mostly for an audience unlikely to know much about international law). To top it all off, Chris looks great on...
Via an e-mail from Dan Joyner I learned today about a new blog he's founded -- Arms Control Law. Here's the pitch from one of the inaugural posts: As the name suggests, this blog will be devoted to discussion and analysis of arms control law subjects. I wanted to start this blog because all of the current blogs in the arms...
Two quick research-related items. First, I'm pleased to report that the 2011 Digest of United States Practice is now available on the State Department website. Here's the description from today's press release: The digest provides the public with a record of the views and practice of the Government of the United States in public and private international law. The official edition...
At one time in the mid-1990s, it seemed like a week couldn't go by without some large gathering of States seeking to hammer out the terms of a new multilateral treaty with aspirations for universal membership. Such treaty negotiations have become a rarer phenomenon today with most meetings now emphasizing implementation of, and compliance with, existing treaties. And where new...
Long-time readers may recall that I have a standing offer to employ my services as a technical consultant for any Hollywood producer or New York Times best-selling novelist looking for accuracy in popular portrayals of international law. And we here at Opinio Juris regularly like to make hay of how popular culture interprets international law and international relations. For our...
The Lotus Case is a pillar of international legal education. Generations of international law students have studied the PCIJ's opinion that Turkey had not acted in conflict with principles of international law in prosecuting a French national -- Lieutenant Demons -- for his role in the collision of a French steamer -- the S.S. Lotus -- with a Turkish vessel --...
That's the question being asked this past week over at US News & World Report's Debate Club. To answer it, US News assembled 7 experts who, with the exception of Bruce Schneier, replied in some form of the negative (see e.g. the responses of Herb Lin (no, or not yet), James Lewis (it's not workable) Sean Lawson (it would be...
Just a quick note of welcome to a new blog from my friends at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. As I noted a while back, Ron Deibert and others have been putting together a great annual interdisciplinary conversation about cyberthreats, the most recent of which was Cyber Dialogue 2012. Now they're moving the conversation into blog form. The first...
As I mentioned a few weeks back, I've been collecting treaty clauses for my book, The Oxford Guide to Treaties, on everything from NGO participation in treaties to their denunciation. In doing so, I tried to cast a wide net, sampling treaties from a wide variety of bilateral and multilateral contexts involving all sorts of States and all sorts of subjects....
