Is there a private right of action under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction? The Fourth Circuit said no in 2006, the Second Circuit now says yes, in an opinion released on Monday (the case is Ozaltin v. Ozaltin; Reuters recap here). Sounds like SCOTUS will have to take the question. Attention student note writers! This may be...
From the closing of last night's State of the Union: We may do different jobs, and wear different uniforms, and hold different views than the person beside us. But as Americans, we all share the same proud title: We are citizens. It’s a word that doesn’t just describe our nationality or legal status. It describes the way we’re made. It describes what...
It was a liberal speech, but also a nationalist one. Obama returned to the citizenship theme of his DNC acceptance speech: My oath is not so different from the pledge we all make to the flag that waves above and that fills our hearts with pride. They are the words of citizens, and they represent our greatest hope. You and I, as...
In case you missed it, Jon Stewart at his best on the Senate's rejection on Tuesday of the Disabilities Convention: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook The floor debate on the CRPD can be found in the Congressional Record here, starting at page S7365. Not very edifying reading on...
Story here on how the CRPD went down. The tally was 61-38, five votes short of the two-thirds necessary for approval. On the one hand, the defeat demonstrates sovereigntism's staying power. The anti-internationalist Right has been energized by a flight of treaties baring the putative menace of global governance -- the Law of the Sea, the Arms Trade Treaty, and the Convention...
Spain is now granting citizenship automatically without any residency requirement to those who can demonstrate descent from those Jews expelled from Spain more than 500 years ago. The rule could make as many as 3 million Sephardic Jews worldwide eligible for Spanish citizenship (600,000 of them in the United States, including a number who identify as Hispanic). The details remain...
Job posting here. This would be a fabulous opportunity for someone with an international law background. Michigan of course has one of the country's top international law faculties and led the way in requiring transnational law as part of its first-law curriculum....
President Obama's visit to Burma/Mynamar has centered the status of the country's Muslim minority Rohingya community which has been denied Burmese citizenship notwithstanding their historical presence in the country. (The issue gets a lot more coverage in the Muslim world than in the West.) Obama's speech today welcomed recent steps by the Burmese government "to address the issues of injustice and...
Everyone else has a piece of this reality show, so why not international law? It turns out that Jill Kelley (for those of you not keeping score, here's the roster) is the honorary consul of Korea in Tampa. She's now looking to use the status defensively. From USA Today: Jill Kelley, the socialite whose complaint to the FBI began the unraveling...
I'll join the chorus of praise for my colleague Duncan's book. It will clearly become the standard reference work in the area. As IL scholarship proliferates, there is a lot of smart money in handbook volumes such as this one. The Oxford Guide to Treaties is a one-stop source for the best thinking on the subject. Duncan is also to be...
As everyone gets a little weary from the blizzard of last-week polls in the lead-up to the election itself, it's not surprising that pollsters have widened their scope to measure the preferences of non-Americans outside the United States. The result: overwhelming for Obama. (The only country in which Romney bests Obama is Pakistan.) Though perhaps not exactly rocket science, Joseph Stiglitz...
I subscribe to the new conventional wisdom that Tuesday's result won't be close, but who knows? If it is, there's always the chance that voters among the 6+ million U.S. citizens living outside the United States will decide the election. Non-resident U.S. citizens are entitled under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act to cast absentee ballots in "the last place...
