Adam Liptak's column yesterday on the relevance of legal scholarship (note that TimesSelect material is now available to anyone with an .edu email address - how long before they wave the white flag on this undertaking?) has predictably generated follow-ons in the legal blogosphere. Jack Balkin does an excellent job putting the story in context, including the context of...
Just when you might have thought it a little safer to go out at night, we have a strong offensive articulation of a sovereignty-based foreign policy to twin with the more traditional defensive one. Anna Simons and her co-authors set out “The Sovereignty Solution” in the latest edition of The American Interest (unfortunately available neither online or Lexis, but...
When two keen observers cross the divide to agree on some basic propositions regarding anti-terrorism policies, we ought to pay attention. Ken Anderson and Elisa Massimino have this think piece out from the Stanley Foundation. (Ken will be known to readers of the blog and Elisa should be -- she heads up the Washington office of Human Rights...
The story yesterday from the WaPo here. (Not really clear what the legal basis for denying the extradition request would be, as described in this post on the International Extradition Blog.) The piece was apparently prompted by Legal Adviser John Bellinger's comments to reporters earlier this week on the margins of talks with EU counterparts: "I do think...
NPR had two interesting segments yesterday on the plight of household workers employed (or, rather, held) by foreign diplomats in the US (here and here). If not for diplomatic immunity, the employers would be subject to prosecution for crimes relating to human trafficking and forced labor. From the sound of it, there are many such cases. Two possible responses:...
Ready for another blue-ribbon commission? This week's entry comes with the launch of a "National War Powers Commission", to be run out of the University of Virginia's Miller Center. Baker will share co-chairing honors with Warren Christopher. Other commission members include Lee Hamilton (how many commissions can one person belong to - Hamilton surely would be at...
There's a move afoot to extend honorary citizenship to Anne Frank (report here). The impulse is obviously a benign one, by way of making amends for the US failure to issue timely visas to her and her family. But might there be a little hubris involved here as well, something of an assumption that she would have been...
Duke Law School hosted a workshop last week with a great line-up on the Law and Politics of International Delegation. Papers are available here. ...
Now that he's officially declared, what do we know about where Barack Obama stands on international law? Not much, of course, given his limited legislative experience. (Anyone know if he took any IL courses at Harvard Law?) Here is his report card from various advocacy groups with IL-related agendas (see also this). Ivo Daalder takes Obama as...
Ed Swaine had suggested in response to post of mine several months back that there might be a downside to the increasing willingness of flagship journals to publish IL-related articles, namely, that student-edited IL specialty journals might be orphaned as a result. That seemed like a plausible hypothesis. To make a comparison to a similar phenomenon in a...
Eugene Volokh has an interesting post over at VC on emerging international norms against hate speech (and hate speech against religions in particular). Though I won't do the argument justice here, the basic line is that these norms are bad and (more perhaps controversially) actually dangerous. (See also his related posts here, here and here.) For the latter proposition,...
Well, sort of. Yoo and co-author Robert Delahunty have a provocative piece in the latest edition of the National Interest ("Lines in the Sand," not available on-line, but you can get it on Lexis) in which they argue against the primacy of the nation-state, or at least the primacy of existing nation-states. The cash-out here, of course,...
