The FDA has approved the import of one Spanish firm's version of Jamon Iberico Bellota, a cured ham which according to this blog makes prosciutto "taste like shoe leather." (Don't expect to see it at your local supermarket, though; at $79 a pound, it's a little on the pricey side.) (Hat tip: Megnut.) Why is the U.S. Government so unwilling...
Martha Nussbaum favorably reviews Catharine MacKinnon’s Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues in the latest edition of The Nation. MacKinnon argues for the international criminalization of sex-related offenses against women (beyond such violence as occurs in the context of otherwise genocidal acts), a position with which Nussbaum strongly aligns herself as a theoretical matter. As for efforts...
Richard Pildes looks on the money when you line up two recent pieces of his with the decision in Hamdan. In the most recent Harvard Law Review, he and Daryl Levinson argue that separation of powers is contingent on divided control of the political branches, and that one-party (“unified”) government should push the Supreme Court to read congressional intent...
There has been a raft of really tough op-eds and editorials against the Bush Administration in the last couple of days. In the LA Times, Mort Halperin calls Bush worse than Nixon (because Bush doesn't just violate the law, he openly defies it); Rosa Brooks ridicules the Hamdan response ("Creativity means never having to say you're sorry."); in the...
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas has come out with its first issue. It looks promising, oriented along the lines of the New America Foundation (at least in terms of author affiliations), one of the best things to come out of the think tank world in recent years. There's substantial foreign policy content here, with a review by Michael...
Interesting exchange between Larry Solum and Orin Kerr on whether teaching hurts scholarship. Here’s Larry’s point (which was in response to a more general post by Stuart Buck): Young scholars spend enormous amounts of time on the “canon,” the cases and rules that are in their casebooks. And so it is hardly surprising that many of them end up writing...
The idea that deporting criminals - especially hardened ones - rids us of the problems they present is put to rest by stories like this one from today's LA Times. Sending criminals to other countries can be a little like sending big hitters to the minor leagues - they end up having a field day. And insofar as...
Steve Charnovitz has an article on NGOs in the latest issue of the American Journal of International Law (check out the new cover), important not the least because it is one of only three "centennial essays" to mark the organization's hundredth birthday. That provides yet further evidence that NGOs really have arrived, when the fairly traditional AJIL features them in...
As Marty Lederman predicted, those memos are being written. The FT is reporting that in the wake of Hamdan, the Pentagon has deemed Common Article 3 to apply to all detainees in U.S. custody. The timing is key, as it should signal to Congress that the Administration isn't interested in legislation overriding US obligations under the Geneva Conventions. In...
I don't know whether Wikipedia is the way of the future, especially in the academic and public policy worlds (hence the tentativeness), but Peter Lattman's post last week about the evolution of Ken Lay's entry after his death (very incidentally) got me checking how international law fares in the collective effort. Not very well, it turns out. Although...
John Yoo has a predictably critical L.A. Times op-ed today on Hamdan. The piece trots out the Lincoln and FDR comparisons, and argues that the decision will “hamper the ability of future presidents to respond to emergencies.” The analysis is no more persuasive than previous defenses of the Administration’s anything-goes approach. It may be true that the...
Amnesty International is considering taking on abortion rights as part of its portfolio. A good summary and critique of the development can be found in this article in the center-right Spectator. The prospect is causing chagrin among conservatives and Catholic members of Amnesty. (The organization was founded by an English Catholic lawyer in 1961.) The controversy shows how...
