Thanks to Opinio Juris for inviting me to blog. I have learned a lot about blogging. It is fun, but the brevity of posts makes misunderstanding easy. My main theme has been the tension between two kinds of global order on offer—one generated by international law and the other by American action, which in turn is regulated by American law....
One international right about which I am extremely enthusiastic is the right of migration. As Ilya Somin and I have written about in the paper I have previously referenced, one concern about international law, if it were actually enforced, is that it would make it harder for individuals to vote with their feet against bad laws, because international law creates...
One issue for international law is the degree of American exceptionalism. Is the United States an exceptional nation in way that suggests international law should not apply to it in the same way as to other nations? Or perhaps its exceptionalism suggests that it should remain strictly dualist and not apply international law without the endorsement of the political...
My purpose here is to provide a brief taxonomy of recent international law skepticism. 1. The Rational Actor Critique: In their book, The Limits of International Law, Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner express skepticism that customary international law often influences the conduct of states. States are rational, self-interested actors and it is difficult for custom to reflect stable equilibria that reflect...
I was very interested to read the New York Times essay on Jack Goldsmith, recently referenced on this blog by Roger Alford. Oddly enough, a week ago, I posted a draft essay, Losing the Law Wars: The Bush Administration’s Strategic Errors, that made some criticisms of the Bush administration’s policies from the outside similar to his from the inside. The...
I want to thank Julian Ku and his colleagues at Opinio Juris for the invitation to blog. This is my initial effort in cyberspace. I begin with some interesting information that I recently learned on a trip to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry at an exhibition of a captured German submarine: the United States once decided, consciously and at...
