In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Peter Spiro

26 Oct

Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson have posted this piece on partisan entrenchment of constitutional norms. It’s a little juriscentric for my taste, although the piece is careful to allow for the constitutional consequence of legislative and executive branch actors (OLC in particular). It’s a useful historical description of how the appointments process has, on a hit-and-miss basis, worked...

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24 Oct

An increasingly common IL curricular offering in law schools comes in the form of a workshop series, with students enrolled for credit. This is a great format, around for probably a decade now but proliferating in the last two or three years. I co-hosted one last year at UGA with Dan Bodansky (the line-up here), and will be...

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19 Oct

With the MCA’s enactment, there seems to be a general sense of despair (or elation, depending on where you sit) that we are now in a world in which anything goes. As Jack Balkin writes, whether or not the MCA actually continues to constrain the President from engaging in certain conduct he characterizes as “torture lite” is an academic...

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17 Oct

See this report here; pretty sketchy, without any elaboration from the Mexican government. It’s not easy to come up with an international law argument against a border fence, although one would assume a human rights basis (especially as combined with empirical evidence of resulting deaths from border smuggling moved into more inhospitable terrain). It wouldn’t seem that there’s...

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15 Oct

We are delighted to have Cesare Romano joining us as a guest for the next two weeks. Cesare is Associate Professor of Law at Loyola Law School - Los Angeles. Between 1997 and 2006, he was the guiding force behind the Project on International Courts and Tribunals. You can find his latest paper on a compulsory paradigm for...

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11 Oct

Sorry to contribute to this phenomenon, but John Yoo’s new book War By Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror is now out from Atlantic Monthly Press (not affiliated with the Atlantic Monthly, I was surprised to discover, though it's something of an explanation), and shouldn’t go ignored. As signaled by the subtitle, this is not...

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10 Oct

Andrew Guzman has these interesting thoughts on the subject over at the International Economic Law and Policy Blog. He wonders why the field is so dominated by trade law. Among his answers, I suspect that it's driven by the relative institutionalization of trade law relative to other components of IEL. A related possibility is that trade law...

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08 Oct

The Boston Globe is running a multi-part story on how the Bush Administration is channeling increasing amounts of foreign aid through faith-based organizations, allegedly breaching the church-state divide in the process. However the constitutional doctrine applies (with the wild card of extraterritoriality), one can find an obvious silver lining here: creating a core Republican constituency for foreign assistance. That’s...

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06 Oct

The story here, without many details. (HT: Orin Kerr at VC.) This adds Harvard to Michigan and Hofstra as schools that require IL in the first year, but Harvard's move obviously increases the probability of a cascade (look at what's happened in the wake of Harvard College's decision on early admissions). Several others schools include IL-related courses...

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06 Oct

Larry Solum has kicked off an interesting exchange on interdisciplinary ignorance among legal academics. My question: how do international law scholars line up against their peers on this measure? My hunch is that IL scholars are more likely to have some interdisciplinary grounding than lawprofs in other fields, for two reasons. First, there was the payoff of...

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01 Oct

The Princeton Project on National Security released its final report last week, entitled Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century. Headed up by Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry, the project involved more than 400 participants, the list of which reads like a who's who of the new (mostly Democrat) foreign policy establishment....

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