Classes have ended, exams just begun, and I'm feeling into the pedagogy of international law teaching and intellectually shallow, all at the same time ...
In case anyone is interested, here is the text of my Fall 2008 final exam in International Business Transactions. (It's over at my much neglected home blog.) I don’t think this was my greatest exam drafting exercise - I’ve done better in past years. Actually, to be perfectly frank, I think it is not very good at all; I liked...
I don't imagine there is any reader of OJ who is not aware of the suffering and devastation caused by malaria. So this is welcome news. A vaccine against the parasitic disease malaria cut illnesses by more than half in field trials and could be safely given with other childhood inoculations, two studies have reported. The vaccine, which will begin a...
International Anti-Corruption Day is sanctioned by the UN as a day to increase awareness of corruption and its effects upon governance and public life. I realize that today's events in Chicago raise the possibilities of some heavy-handed irony - but actually, I'm pleased in a quite un-ironic way. If one has to have the phenomenon of this day for this,...
After several months of application kept up at every moment, Julien still had the air of a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and opening his lips did not reveal an implicit faith ready to believe everything and to uphold everything, even by martyrdom. It was with anger that Julien saw himself surpassed in this respect by the most...
Update, Friday, December 5. Eric Posner was kind enough to cite me on this and some other posts referenced under the Guantanamo tag. Eric might well be right in saying that this is premature; I am blogging about this, but will look more seriously (i.e., assign a research assistant to dig out What They Said Under Bush, What They Said...
Crossborder remittance payments by immigrant workers to their relatives back home are an increasingly important capital movement in the world, especially among poor people. The United States, for example, has sometimes treated remittance payments as part of its calculations of international aid public and private. It has only recently started to receive academic attention, however. My colleague Ezra Rosser has...
Remarkable story in today's Wall Street Journal, front page, December 1, 2008, about a Latvian economist arrested and held for several days - not finally charged - for expressing pessimistic sentiment about the stability of the Latvian financial system: How to Combat a Banking Crisis: First, Round Up the Pessimists Latvian Agents Detain a Gloomy Economist; 'It Is a Form of Deterrence' I have stuck...
Georgetown Security Law Brief blog has a super-useful roundup of what a wide variety of people have said about what to do about detainees at Guantanamo. It goes backwards by date, with op eds, articles, blog posts, all sorts of stuff, including stuff from here at OJ. If you want to know what the state of discussion is as of...
Well, not really Stendhal on Thanksgiving. Stendhal never visited the United States, but that did not inhibit him from expressing a great many opinions about the place (mostly negative observations in the 'nation of shopkeepers' vein), particularly in the entire chapter devoted to love in the United States in that curious book-length essay, On Love. Stendhal was highly skeptical...
Further to Chris's post below, I wanted to announce that Complex Terrain Lab will be hosting, in addition to the event just passed that Chris mentions, an online blog discussion of Antoine Bosquet's The Scientific Way of Warfare, between Friday, December 5 and Monday, December 8. It will feature a number of guest bloggers, including me, and, having read most...
(Professor Martin Scheinin, whose mission and report on the US and counterterrorism and human rights I discussed below, was kind enough to post a substantive response to my earlier post, "Try or Release." Particularly since I was quite critical of that report, let me move Professor's Scheinin's response up to its own post. Apologies for not noticing it earlier -...
