In an unfortunate rotation, the African Union's annual summit is being held in Khartoum, Sudan this year. This is unfortunate because the host always is nominated for the leadership of the group, but that would mean the AU this year would be headed by perhaps its most unsavory member: the government of Sudan.This minor leadership battle is a larger challenge...
This week I'll be one of a number of guest-bloggers over at PrawfsBlawg. This is an opportunity for me to post about stuff not directly related to international law. But never fear, I will continue to be posting here as well. Should be fun. Please check in....
Cool! A U.S. Navy vessel has boarded and captured a suspected pirate operating off the coast of Somalia. As Roger noted a while ago here, pirates recently chased a cruise liner in the same waters. It looks like the U.S. Navy is on the case.But what legal authority does the U.S. Navy have to board and capture a suspected pirate...
As the NYT reports, the U.S. Justice Department has released a memo defending the legality of the controversial NSA spying program. The NYT (of course) barely describes the memo and then devotes half of the article to quotes by legal experts who say it is unpersuasive. Dean Robert Reinstein speaks of a scholarly consensus that the NSA program is illegal.Unbelievably,...
Professor Arthur von Mehren, Story Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, passed away yesterday at the age of 83. The Harvard statement on his death is here. Professor von Mehren was one of the pioneers in American legal education in the fields of comparative law, choice of laws, international litigation and international commercial arbitration. Professor von...
Big Lumber has filed a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit further elaborating its attack on the constitutionality of part of the NAFTA review process (which I described briefly here). Their brief is not yet available online (UPDATE: the brief can be accessed here. Thanks to reader Simon Lester for the pointer). I do...
To the relief of margarita drinkers all over the U.S., the United States and Mexico signed an agreement Tuesday that will allow continued bulk shipments of tequila from Mexico into the United States. Since 2003, Mexico has been threatening to require all tequila from Mexico to be bottled in Mexico, thus threatening U.S. bottling company jobs (and that ever...
Nigeria announced today that it had finally reached an agreement with Cameroon to implement a 2002 ICJ decision demarcating part of the boundary between the two countries.To put it bluntly, it is about time. The original case was filed in the ICJ in 1994 and the final judgment was issued in 2002. Even after this judgment on the merits, the...
It's all Alito all the time here at Opinio Juris (OK, not quite. Thanks to Chris and Peggy for breaking the Alito obsession, but here I go again).Sen. Feinstein and Sen. Feingold questioned Alito again on the NSA wiretapping issue and invokes, once again, Justice Jackson's concurrence in Youngstown setting out a framework for analyzing presidential powers. A couple of...
Stunningly, Sen. Joe Biden has actually asked a good question: Can the President invade Iran without a declaration of war by Congress? (He claims that Professor "Ho" makes this argument. I assume he means Professor John Yoo of Berkeley).Somewhat surprisingly, Alito gives Biden a fairly complete answer, even though this will almost certainly come before the Court soon. He explains...
Sure, Judge Alito is getting grilled by the Senate, but let's turn to really important stuff. Like the news today that the Republic of Djibouti has filed an application with the International Court of Justice against France alleging France violated its treaty obligations to provide judicial assistance in a Djibouti criminal investigation. This looks like a fairly tedious and...
A group of prominent law scholars and attorneys has issued a letter rejecting the U.S. government's legal justification for the NSA spying program (the legality of which Professor Weinberger and I debated here and here). This is not your typical letter by the liberal law professoriate (although the usual suspects like Harold Koh, Laurence Tribe and Kathleen Sullivan appear). The...
