This from friend of OJ Harlan Cohen. The chair is in honor of Gabe Wilner, a longtime professor of international law at UGA. The University of Georgia School of Law invites applications for a fully endowed professorship in international law beginning August of 2016. Applicants should be able to join the faculty at the rank of full professor. They should have...
Long-awaited decision here finding the President to have exclusive recognition power, trumping Congress' attempt to require birthplace of US citizens born in Jerusalem to be recorded as "Israel" on US passports issued to them. 1. Phew. Who knows what the response would have been in the Middle East if the Court had come out the other way. Maybe nothing, but it's...
Short answer: yes. Ted Cruz is constitutionally eligible to run for President. As he moves to announce his candidacy tomorrow, the question is sure to flare up again. As most will know, Cruz was born in Canada. He had U.S. citizenship at birth through his mother and the forerunner to section 301(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. He also had...
I'll one-up Julian's post below on Tom Cotton's letter to the leaders of Iran admonishing them that any agreement entered into today could be reversed by Obama's successor. It appears unprecedented for a group of opposition members of Congress to engage in such a communication. It may also be criminal. The 1799 Logan Act provides that: Any citizen of the United States, wherever he...
It's finally seeping into the mainstream consciousness that the U.S. tax system works very aggressively against citizens abroad, even those who are citizens in name only. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, is renouncing his U.S. citizenship after he had to pay a hefty IRS tab on capital gains on the sale of his London home. Johnson was born in the U.S....
My earlier post on whether John Boehner's invitation to Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have triggered a little in-house conservative disagreement on the issue (or at least Weekly Standard's Adam J. White is giving me credit for that). Mike Ramsey and David Bernstein come out against the invite's constitutionality here and here; White argues in favor. As I left off my first...
John Boehner has invited Bibi Netanyahu to address Congress. There's a modern tradition of foreign leaders appearing before the legislature (list here). I'm willing to bet that every single one of those appearances was pre-cleared with the State Department or White House in advance. I'm no student of Middle East politics, but it's seems pretty clear that the the White House...
You know you’ve reached a certain age when you start saying, “I remember when. . .” Well, I remember when international law was considered a legal chimera and an academic backwater. Policymakers would take it into account in only a limited set of circumstances, and then usually only where it was consistent with other agendas. In law schools it was ghettoized:...
I was quoted in the NY Times on Friday on Obama's executive action on immigration to the effect that it is unprecedented in scale and formality. I'll stick to that position, but that doesn't mean that I think that the executive action is unconstitutional. Just a few thoughts to clear that up (especially since David Brooks used the quote on...
Citizenship for sale schemes have become an increasingly common phenomenon as the rich from non-Western states look to upgrade their travel privileges. The likes of Malta, Cyprus, and St. Kitts have had some success selling citizenship to plutocrats from Russia, China and other non-visa waiver countries. The revenues supply a nice fiscal bump at low marginal cost to these small...
Transcript of today's argument here. Scalia, Roberts, and Alito are siding with petitioner (and Congress), Kagan and Sotomoyor are with the Government. Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kennedy didn't tip their hands clearly one way or the other. A lot of speech-related framings. Zivotofsky's lawyer argued that allowing "Israel" as a choice for those born in Jerusalem is a matter of self-identification. Kagan...
Everyone is ramping up for Monday's Supreme Court argument in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, with notable entries from Jack Goldsmith on Lawfare, Marty Lederman on Just Security, and Eugene Kontorovich on Volokh. They have been debating a narrow doctrinal basis (suggested by the SG and pressed by Jack) for striking down the law as a kind of passport regulation beyond Congress'...
