In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Kenneth Anderson

06 Feb

The Wall Street Journal has an article today, February 6, 2009, front page, on the rush by states to enact new trade barriers in all sorts of ways.  The WTO is expressing great concern, indeed saying that it is unable even to keep up with tracking the barriers being erected. The landscape is moving so fast that officials at the WTO,...

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05 Feb

Chris mentioned earlier the NPR interview with Brookings Institution scholar PW Singer on his new book, Wired for War.  I am naturally reading the book as we speak, but for those wanting a useful, clear, short take from Singer himself, check out the Winter 2009 issue of the Wilson Quarterly, and Singer's cover article, "Robots at War: The New Battlefield."...

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02 Feb

My Washington College of Law colleague, Darren Hutchinson - a brilliant and distinguished scholar in constitutional law, jurisprudence, critical race theory and identity theory - takes on Human Rights Watch for the apparent shift in position on rendition it took under the Bush administration and long-time Washington advocacy director Tom Malinowski's comments on rendition under the Obama administration, as reported...

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28 Jan

(Update: In addition to thanks to our commentators, I want to flag in particular the extended version of Euan Macdonald's comments over at the global administrative law blog.  And thanks to David Zaring, as well, for his comments over at The Conglomerate blog.  Very interesting reactions - check them out.) Well, I think it is an on-going debate, anyway!  I was...

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24 Jan

I am unclear as to one thing in the Executive Order issued by President Obama regarding interrogation practices.  The text of the Executive Order is here.  It provides that the CIA must conform to the Army manual with respect to interrogation techniques, but says (bold-face added): (b)  Interrogation Techniques and Interrogation-Related Treatment.  Effective immediately, an individual in the custody or under...

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22 Jan

I have a new paper up on SSRN, appearing shortly in the Wayne Law Review, The Assumptions Behind the Assumptions in the War on Terror: Risk Assessment as an Example of Foundational Disagreement in Counterterrorism Policy.  Here is the abstract from SSRN, with apologies from the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion: This 2007 article (based around an invited conference talk at Wayne...

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21 Jan

Although a DC resident, I couldn't persuade myself or my wife to brave the crowds or the cold to attend the inauguration yesterday, and instead watched it instead with a group of friends on hdtv.  Leaving aside Chief Justice Roberts fumbling the oath (see last graph in this post for President Obama retaking the oath on January 21), some of...

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11 Jan

'Whatever are you dreaming of, sir?'  Mathilde asked him.  There was a note of intimacy in her question, and she had come back running and was quite out of breath in her eagerness to be with him.  Julien was tired of self-suppression.  In a moment of pride, he told her frankly what he was thinking. (The Red and the Black, vol....

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04 Jan

John Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org website, has a provocative op-ed in today's Washington Post (January 4, 2009, B3) arguing that the evolution of battlefield robots might mean robots as the soldiers that do the killing on future battlefields: Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, "minds that are to our minds...

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04 Jan

... economics and Hume are the fashion. (The Red and the Black, volume 2, chapter 53, "The Clergy, Their Forests, Liberty.")  Special edition for ... Eric Posner, Adrian Vermeule, Andrew Guzman, Jack Goldsmith, and Kal Raustiala!  (Utilitarianism has a long cultural, indeed literary, history.)...

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