Alan Wolfe started a thread over at The New Republic’s new Open University by suggesting that the recent APSA was too focused on things foreign as opposed to things domestic. I was there, too (to do a panel on birthright citizenship and to take in the excellent roundtable on international tribunals, among a few others). But my impression,...
Jeremy Rabkin has this piece in the Weekly Standard on what the latest Mideast conflict has to say about IL. As is true of Rabkin's other work, it's nicely argued and knowledgeable. Without getting into the substance of the particular issues (Rabkin's take here hinges on classifying standards of proportionality as something other than customary international law to...
According this report out of Australia, in early July Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks was granted UK citizenship only to be stripped of the status the very next day. The British courts had confirmed Hicks' claim to the British tie through his London-born mother. Hicks apparently hoped that British citizenship would lead to his release (as has been...
So suggests an Irish parliamentarian in the Irish Times (text available here). I don't think so, for two reasons. First, law in any form is going to be uneven in its coverage. Gerald Neuman had a wonderful 1996 piece in the Stanford Law Review entitled "Anomalous Zones," about the geographically and temporally discontinuous application of the law. ...
The Human Rights Committee has released an advance copy of its report on US compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. From a quick skim, it looks highly critical. (Just like the PR-insensitive UN to issue something newsworthy like this on a late summer Friday.) A predictable number of observations address GWOT detainee issues,...
I imagine John Gerard Ruggie knew he was throwing a bomb when he released his interim report on the Norms earlier this year. But perhaps that’s exactly what Kofi Annan had in mind in naming him as his Special Representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations. Approved by the UN Human Rights Commission in 2003,...
Not too many responses to my tepid call a few weeks back to beef up the international law offerings on this collective effort. There is now an entry for Abram Chayes (by Mark K. Jensen - it is possible to record one's authorship, on an entry's history page). I took it on myself to expand, however inadequately, the...
Eugene Volokh has a post over at the Conspiracy on the eligibility of foreign citizens to serve as judicial law clerks. As he notes, many are, so long as they hail from a country with which the U.S. has a defense treaty. I know of at least one instance of a non-citizen (from an EU state) clerking at...
The Truman National Security Project appears to have assembled a remarkably well-credentialed network of young (as in 20- and 30-something) foreign policy experts to devise an alternative among Democrats to neocons on the one hand (to the extent that any remain Democrat) and Vietnam-era leftists on the other. The group articulates a foreign-policy vision that couples strength, including the...
Rick Kirgis has a helpful international legal analysis of North Korea's test launchings over the Sea of Japan earlier this month. Perhaps the best rule would be: crazy dictators shouldn't be allowed to play with matches. ...
The chance for major immigration reform during this session of Congress has apparently passed, according to this Reuters item here and an editorial in yesterday’s Times. Although I teach and write in immigration law, I have found this year’s high-profile debate on the subject pretty unedifying. This is in part because it has been mostly about politics rather...
