John Bolton is at it again. After getting Security Council agreement on a resolution threatening Iran, he is preparing to push a plan to change the formula for paying U.N. dues. It would base U.N. dues on Purchasing Power Parity rather than gross national product. This sounds complicated, but it would essentially require Russia and China to start...
Although I'm obviously interested in the Court's argument today in Sanchez-Llamas/Bustillo (see related posts below) considering the private rights created by the Vienna Convention, I don't have any thing to add to this very useful account of oral argument by Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog. It sounds like the Court may avoid the self-executing treaty puzzle and impose a duty on...
Charles Taylor, the ex-Liberian leader wanted for war crimes by the Sierra Leone International Court, has been apprehended and transferred to Liberia, the BBC reports. This comes just after President Bush threatened to call off a meeting with the Nigerian leader. The politics of this is no doubt quite murky and will continue to be murky once he gets...
The relentless Ariel Lavinbuk files this report after spending the day at the Supreme Court observing the oral argument today in Hamdan (and then scrambling back up to New Haven to get back to school). The argument he made in Slate yesterday, the Pocket Part, and of course, here on Opinio Juris, was discussed at length today by the...
While I've been obsessively focused on the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of Hamdan, the ICJ has continued plowing through its hearings on Bosnia's case alleging Serbia's responsibility for genocide. As I noted earlier, the ICJ had imposed a weird non-disclosure requirement on those attending its witness testimony this past week. That requirement was lifted today and the hearing...
CSpan has the Hamdan oral argument going. [Actually, the oral argument is best found here at the Georgetown Law School website]. I've been listening to parts of the Katyal argument and he actually invested a substantial amount of time in the argument Ariel Lavinbuk* has been making and we've been discussing here: whether conspiracy is a permissible violation of...
The ubiquitous Neal Katyal, a lawprof at Georgetown, is currently completing his oral argument at the Supreme Court on behalf of Hamdan. In addition to be Hamdan's counsel of record, Katyal is a well-known legal scholar who presented a paper just this last weekend at the Yale Law symposium on executive power. He also has a very readable pragmatic...
As some human rights activists had feared, former Liberian President Charles Taylor has disappeared from his villa in Nigeria, just days after Nigeria agreed to turn him over to the new Liberian government and the Special International Sierra Leone court for war crimes. Nigeria is claiming they don't know what happened, but this certainly sounds fishy. ...
Ariel Lavinbuk, a 3L at Yale Law, has an interesting proposal on how the Supreme Court should resolve the upcoming Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case. He argues in Slate that the Court should avoid all the hard issues as to legality of military commissions under the Constitution and international treaties. Rather, they should simply hold that even if the commissions are...
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear two of the most important cases on the status of treaty and international law in the U.S. system in the last fifty years. On Tuesday, Scotus will consider the petition of Hamdan, an alleged Al Qaeda member who is challenging the legality of the system of military commissions under U.S. law...
Check out this useful Foreign Affairs essay on the tricky problem of how to regulate the Internet as more and more countries have a stake in how the Internet develops and evolves. I think the burden rests on foreign critics who want to alter the existing system. Fears of U.S. "unilateralism" strike me as overblown in this context...
The ICJ is holding witness testimony this week in its ongoing public hearings on the Application of the Genocide Convention to Serbia and Montenegro. As the ICJ's press release points out, there have only been nine cases involving witness testimony in the ICJ's entire 50-plus year history, so this is a rare event. It is also semi-removed from...
