Columbia University's Jagdish Bhagwati and Francisco Rivera-Batiz have an excellent piece in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs in which they throw up their hands at the prospect of comprehensive immigration reform and look to the states for some progress on the issue. The piece served as the basis for Bhagwati's delivery last week of the 2013 Emma Lazarus Lecture,...
Peggy, Julian, Duncan and I took a stab at a podcast discussion of Tuesday's Supreme Court arguments in Bond v. United States. [audio mp3="https://opiniojuris.org/wp-content/uploads/oj-podcast.mp3"][/audio] You can now find an audio of the argument itself here. Mentioned in the course of the discussion are related posts by David Golove and Michael Ramsey here and here. The Nick Rosencranz Harvard Law Review article that...
Very interesting hearing yesterday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. C-Span video here. Treaty opponents are focused on the associated Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (charged with considering state-party compliance) and the risk of evolving treaty meanings. It's perfect terrain on which to transpose longstanding anxieties regarding activist...
Has the federal government ever put Missouri v. Holland to work? I don't think so, though I always hesitate to state it categorically. The Supreme Court's 1920 decision in Holland squarely held that the Treaty Power adds something to other enumerated federal authorities. But there appears to be no instance in which the federal government has actually used a treaty...
As foreign relations law wonks gear up for next Tuesday's argument in Bond v. United States, I wanted to ask, how did we end up with this case, anyway? The small-time, slightly sordid facts are (for classroom purposes) a lawprof's dream. For those of you who haven't been following along, the case involves a love triangle in which a wife...
Josh Gerstein has this interesting piece at Politico on how the citizenship divide is breaking down as a defensible perimeter in the legal justification of electronic surveillance. It's clear where the old reflex is coming from: lawyers steeped in a constitutional tradition that distinguishes citizens from foreigners (and US territory from foreign territory) in the application of constitutional rights. (The...
You never know, President Obama might turn things around. On the other hand, things sound bad on the Hill. The Administration would have to run the table to get a yes-vote from both houses of Congress (it's uphill even in the Senate). It may not be too early to start writing the post-mortems. The key mistake Obama made was going to Congress...
The Senate has a draft resolution authorizing the use of force in Syria up for mark-up today, which you can find here. In its key operative provision, the resolution authorizes the use of force to 60 days only, subject to a 30-day extension upon a presidential certification of "extraordinary circumstances." If Congress doesn't extend the authorization, it is thereafter terminated. SECTION 4. TERMINATION...
Doesn't sound like it, if you read between the lines of this AP account. Until Friday, everyone was assuming that congressional pre-clearance was not constitutionally required or otherwise warranted. Obama's national security team was in agreement that while consulting with Congress was critical, there was no need for formal approval, officials said. Seeking a vote in Congress to authorize a strike...
President Obama's decision to seek authorization for military intervention in Syria is a watershed in the modern history of war powers. At no point in the last half century at least has a president requested advance congressional authorization for anything less than the full-scale use of force. Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf gets it exactly right: Whatever happens with regard to Syria, the...
Just a note to highlight OJ's Twitter feed, which you can find here. We link to posts on the blog, but there's added content in the form of pointers to other items that might be of interest to OJ readers. For those of you that haven't taken up the habit, some serious material is floating around the Twitterverse at the same time...
Eyal Benvenisti's excellent piece sets the stage for a substantial research agenda (hence the need for a major project to pursue its many possible applications). Benvenisti considers aspects of his trusteeship norm largely in the realm of international tribunals. There is also the possibility of direct internalization. I read the piece through the optic of US decisionmaking. My first thought was,...
