In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Peter Spiro

03 Jul

As July 4th approaches, get ready for stock-in-trade accounts of uplifting naturalization ceremonies conducted in dignified settings and presided over by distinguished persons. That's a nice thing for those who see citizenship through a traditional lens and who should be getting better value for an $800 naturalization fee (never mind that most naturalization ceremonies occur in DMV-like conditions in local...

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27 Jun

John Kyl, Douglas Feith, and John Fonte have this offering in the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs. It's a strong restatement of the sovereigntist position on the incorporation of international law from a powerful trio - Kyl, the sovereigntist legislator par excellence; Feith, the veteran executive branch point-man; and Fonte, the house intellectual. But the piece feels tired from the...

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12 Jun

The NSA may be collecting data on Americans in the United States. What about Americans abroad? "Foreign intelligence" is a term threaded through the surveillance debate, with a general understanding that collecting that kind of information is okay. The term is defined in a territorial sense, in the sense of intelligence originating outside of the United States. Under the FISA Amendments...

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04 Jun

Here's the official explanation: the US had yet to "satisfactorily complete" the "process of conforming the official translations" of the agreement. Via Twitter, FP's David Bosco sees a back-up excuse once the analysts at State finish reading the French version: US delays signing arms trade treaty as experts verify that no provisions were written in invisible ink. Bosco is almost certainly on the...

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07 May

When I was writing my book on citizenship several years ago, I wanted to take on what I thought was a standard trope of American political discourse: "the rights and obligations of citizenship." Though it hardly seemed like an alien phrase, I had trouble finding good examples of its use by major political leaders. I won't have that problem any more. President...

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07 May

Ted Cruz is running for president, and an election-addled media is training its sights on his nascent candidacy in the absence of many alternatives this early in the cycle. His birth outside the United States is inevitably raising the eligibility question. Cruz was born in Calgary to a US-citizen mother and a non-citizen father. Under section 301(g) of the Nationality Act,...

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03 May

Columbia University historian Samuel Moyn has a tough post up on the Foreign Affairs website on Kiobel and the arc of the Alien Tort Statute, which he sees as having served the narrow constituency of us rather than being true to the historical origins of human rights: The ATS has been a boon for U.S. law schools, in which students rightly...

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02 May

Probably not. The tragedy in Bangladesh -- more than 400 dead -- on the heels of a fire there in November, is no doubt casting a negative light on non-governmental certification schemes. But there's no clear alternative. Voluntary codes of conduct are now routinely subject to institutionalized third party supply-chain monitoring (evidenced by the fact that a number of monitoring firms...

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17 Apr

This is a tough loss for the human rights advocacy community, ending an era that began with the Second Circuit's rediscovery of the Alien Tort Statute in its 1980 decision in Filartiga v. Pena. As Julian highlights below, Justice Kennedy may have left the door ajar to future claims, but only barely. Even Breyer's concurrence -- the rejection of the...

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12 Mar

OJ's own Duncan Hollis has been awarded the American Society of International Law's "Certificate of Merit for High Technical Craftsmanship and Utility to Practicing Lawyers and Scholars" for his edited volume The Oxford Guide to Treaties. (Other honorees this year are Jeremy Waldron and Petros C. Mavroidis.) From the citation: The Oxford Guide to Treaties brings clarity to a topic of central...

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