Dianne Feinstein introduced a bill on Monday which would shut down Guantanamo. (Not clear whether it would also shut down the military commissions - the bill calls for release, detention as an enemy combatant, or prosecution before an Article II court or "military legal proceeding before a regularly-constituted court," which of course the commissions are deemed by the MCA.)...
Here's a recent decision out of the Ninth Circuit finding a Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation treaty not to preempt state employment law, at least not with respect a whistlerblower statute. (H/T: David Zaring and the Administrative LawProf Blog.) But I was unaware that FCN treaties do allow discrimination on the basis of nationality, in favor of nationals of...
Speaking of doing global good, what do we think of this effort by Goldman Sachs to securitize foreign aid to increase immunization rates? The International Finance Facility for Immunization (IFFIm) has raised a billion dollars through a debt issue that has the effect of frontloading aid, delivering it more quickly than it would be in the ordinary course. ...
Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim proposes a ratings agency for NGOs to akin to those assessing creditworthiness in the global financial system in this piece from the WaPo. Naim highlights the rise of government-organized NGOs (GONGOs) that "are crowding out and muddling the voices of the country's legitimate civil society. . . [The] effectiveness of nongovernmental organizations will suffer...
Michael Hirsh thinks it is, in this tightly argued piece in the latest edition of the Washington Monthly. He takes on the new conventional wisdom that the global system will have to be fundamentally reordered in the wake of the Bush Administration’s “lethal mixture of arrogance and incompetence.” The article singles out Obama and his foreign policy crew...
I'm wondering if this line will pop up in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre. The shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, was a permanent resident alien. I don't know if the National Rifle Association conceives its mission to include the rights of noncitizens to bear arms (a little tricky given the Second Amendment's use of "the People"), or whether...
There seems to be some resurgence in efforts to use state pension funds to foreign policy ends. California is looking to divest from companies doing business in Iran, and several states have done so with respect to Sudan (now supported by Mia Farrow and Martin Peretz). Are these measures unconstitutional? In February, a federal district court judge struck...
Jose Alvarez's ASIL presidential address is now up on the Society's website here, along with the companion 50 Ways IL Harms Us. I'd missed that the "smug levels" observation was part of a South Park allusion (see page 5), which may have sent some members running to their teenage grandchildren for guidance (though I have to admit that coming...
Word had it that Jose Alvarez would be not be offering up a conventional presidential address on Friday at the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law, and it lived up to the billing (good thing for the advance chatter; the general business session is usually skipable, unless you're winning an award, although I hear things were also...
That's always been true in some cases, of course, but maybe there's more potential today. Two recent examples. The first (report from the WaPo here) involves the scaling back by 40 major banks of Iran-related business, which is hitting home in Tehran more than any form of diplomatic action. The move by the banks is apparently at...
Just out from Oxford University Press: The Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law, edited by my former University of Georgia colleague Dan Bodansky along with Jutta Brunnee and Ellen Hey. It's an impressive collection of 47 entries, with contributions from the likes of Christopher Stone, Peter Sand, Richard Stewart, Scott Barrett, Benedict Kingsbury, and Steve Ratner. I have...
I was struck by two separate items in the NYT on successive days earlier this week involving the return of the bodies of dead immigrants to their homelands. Both were tragic stories, one involving a Mexican pizza delivery person shot in Greenwich Village, the other a family of Malians who died in a home fire in the Bronx. ...
