Ruth Wedgwood of Johns Hopkins SAIS asked if I would post this job announcement flyer for a visiting professor in international law at JHU Nanjing University Center in China. Ruth adds that the salary offered might not be what DC law schools normally pay but might work well with a sabbatical or grant arrangements, also that the position has not...
The WSJ has a news story (Nathan Koppel, "Arcane Law Brings Conflicts From Overseas to U.S. Courts," Thursday, August 27, 2009) on the rise of ATS suits against corporate defendants. It quotes Curt Bradley, but interestingly (I thought, for an area traditionally dominated by academics), it has more quotes from practicing lawyers, including John Bellinger, Center for Constitutional Rights's Katherine Gallagher,...
A remark in passing by KJH ("law review editors, I mean you") caused me to recall a question I've had for a while. Do student law review, or international law review, editors read or know about OJ? I have asked this question of my own school's international law review editors over the last couple of years, and the answer was...
So says the headline of a WSJ news article today (Monday, August 24, 2009, B1, by August Cole), noting that unmanned aircraft - drones such as the Predator to us civilians, although the Pentagon seems to prefer UMV - are transforming not just the military, strategic as well as tactical considerations, but defense contracting. (PopSci ran a story a little...
Ruth Wedgwood comments at Forbes magazine website on the "compassionate" release of Al-Megrahi from prison in Scotland. I agree overall with Ruth: Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, is now a free man. He was convicted in the specially created Hague trial court by a panel of Scottish judges, and his appeal was rejected by the Scottish appellate chamber. He remained in prison...
[caption id="attachment_9512" align="alignright" width="137" caption=""][/caption] The battlefield robots we have mostly discussed here at Opinio Juris are those that are about remote control - realtime control by a human operator who is not actually in the cockpit of the Predator, for example. We've talked somewhat about autonomy issues and robots - battlefield robots with programming enabling them to be able to...
Aaron Zelinsky, YLS '10, smart person and occasional correspondent with me, has an article up at HuffPo arguing for a certain parallel (a negative one) between the Lockerbie release this week and the Guantanamo detainees. Aaron argues that it was wrong for the Lockerbie bomber to have been released, and would not have been, had he been tried and convicted...
Here is the official call for papers for the 2010 ASIL Lieber Society Military Prize essay. To enter a paper, you do not have to be a member of ASIL, but you do have to be a member of your "nation's regular or reserve armed forces." This particular essay contest, in other words, is for military personnel. The prize is...
The WSJ has a very important (and certain to be much debated) story today on the front page, "A Global Surge in Tiny Loans Spurs Credit Bubble in a Slum," WSJ, A1, Thursday August 13, 2009. Also see the follow on stories, "Group borrowing leads to pressure," which is about the problem that when you use 'peer pressure' rather than...
The ever useful and interesting Crimes of War Project website has posted a useful background web article on the debate in the General Assembly over the scope and status of 'responsibility to protect' (R2P). I've blogged at OJ about this before, citing to an Economist article summarizing the debate and some other things. The COW report, by Katherine Iliopoulos, can...
I am blogger-lite this week, with apologies to all, but ...
Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban commander who orchestrated, among many other things, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and many other atrocities, is dead. The initial, somewhat confused reports expressed some doubts, but experts are gradually concluding that a US Predator missile strike killed him. At the strategic level, this is one area in which the US is having success. One can find...
