Author: Julian Ku

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy has offered a series of posts detailing some writing John Yoo did in 2000 criticizing the Clinton administration. Orin's posts are fair, careful and persuasive in some parts, but it has been distorted and transmogrified by the lefty blogosphere into an unfair attack on Yoo (which Kevin regrettably perpetuates below). (Disclosure: I'm a...

One of the nice things about my time visiting here at William & Mary School of Law is the opportunity to attend conferences like the "Supreme Court Preview" sponsored by W&M's Institute for the Bill of Rights Law. Tonight I attended a panel which included both Georgetown Law professor Neal Katyal, the attorney who argued and won the Hamdan...

Last week, the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. allowed some of the claims in a lawsuit brought by U.S. citizens alleging injuries caused by the Saddam-era Iraqi government during the 1991 Gulf War to continue. The ruling in Vine v. Iraq is mostly a win for the new Iraqi government, which has been diligently defending these and other...

One of the crucial weapons used by the U.S. government in the war on terrorism has been the freezing of financial assets linked to or believed to be related to Al Qaeda. This is one U.S. anti-terrorism policy that has generally received wide support within the U.S. (unlike some other policies) as well as broad support from the U.N....

Students at the law school at the University of California at Hastings Law School have started a new blog called Transnational Law Blog. Inspired by Professor Jessup's concept of transnational law, the blog is "is only constrained by its pursuit to address all law transcending national frontiers." They already have some great posts on the Japanese war crimes litigation...

Here's a cautionary tale for all you constitutional comparativists out there. Yesterday the United Kingdom convicted its first individual after the reform of its "double jeopardy" rule, which prohibits individuals from being tried twice for the same crime (thanks to my current colleague Professor Paul Marcus of William & Mary Law for the heads up). The same double...

Readers of Opinio Juris have a rare chance to determine who is a more reliable Washington pundit: Steve Clemons of the Washington Note or Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard. As Kevin points out below, Clemons is reporting that Bolton's nomination is "dead." At the same time, Fred Barnes has devoted a full cover story in the Weekly...

One of my favorite legal journalists Dahlia Lithwick has a very fairminded review in Slate of Judge Richard Posner's recent book Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency. According to Lithwick, Posner's book argues that, "broader government surveillance powers, computerized data-mining, zealous deterrence of media leaks, and even 'coercive interrogation up to and including...