Justice Scalia was the keynote speaker yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute on the subject of the role of international law in American courts. The agenda for the full program, which included Julian Ku and guest blogger Bill Dodge, is available here. The speech is available on C-Span here (via How Appealing).Here is an abstract of his speech:Foreign law is...
The Supreme Court today rendered an important decision in Gonzalez v. O Centro Espirita concerning religious practices that are in violation of statutory and treaty obligations relating to controlled substances. The discussion of the treaty obligation is quite short: Before the District Court, the Government also asserted an interest in compliance with the 1971 United...
Brandt Goldstein at the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today addressing the current debate in the legal academy regarding the relative merits and demerits of law reviews and academic blogs. But in an interesting twist, he challenges the legitimacy of law reviews as much as engaging the current debate about the role of academic blogging. Here is an...
This story coming out of Britain is quite amazing: "Four out of 10 British Muslims want sharia law introduced into parts of the country, a survey reveals today...
The Washington Post has published a wonderful article on the Chinese government's failing attempt at Internet censorship. The overwhelming impression of the article is that, try as they might, the Chinese government is not going to be able to effectively censor information on the Internet. There are so many channels of information that the Chinese censors are flailing.The article is...
I have solicited the thoughts of Prof. Geoffrey Corn, a law of war expert and former guest blogger at Opinio Juris, on the latest Abu Ghraib photos. Here's his take on the release of the new photos:On Wednesday, a new batch of Abu Ghraib photographs hit the press. The world is once again reminded of the “shocking and awful” abuse...
IBM Research is doing some amazing work on protecting the intellectual property of Internet images through watermarks. The purpose of the watermark is to provide a secondary image which is overlaid translucently on the primary image that can be used to protect intellectual property or to provide authentication and validation of images. For example, this top image has embedded within...
Robert McMahon at the Council on Foreign Relations has a nice primer on Chinese efforts to curtail political speech. The post includes a discussion of how China does it, what role U.S. firms play in the process, how important the Internet is to China, whether Congress is planning any action, and technological efforts to bypass the censorship through proxy servers....
The Washington Post is reporting that the United States is prepared to spend $75 million to promote democracy in Iran. According to the report, "the United States hopes to capitalize on the 'disturbing trend of Iranian diplomacy' since Ahmadinejad's election, including the refusal to continue negotiations on the nuclear program...
Today we learn that Islamic fundamentalists are burning fast-food restaurants in Pakistan to protest the Danish cartoons. It is hard to ever feel sorry for McDonalds, but I do today. I checked the McDonald's menu for Pakistan, including the "McArabia," and could not find anything that was particularly offensive to the Prophet. I guess it was the cheese Danishes....
Christiana Ochoa of Indiana Law School has just published in the University of Cincinnati Law Review an interesting article entitled, Towards a Cosmopolitian Vision of International Law. The article and an abstract is available on SSRN here. The article addresses Sosa and the role of the judiciary in establishing customary international law.But it is Part VI that really...
Okay, you think the title is a stretch. But if you look behind the history of the holiday you may conclude that Valentine's Day has less to do with love than war. Legend has it that under the reign of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Claudius Gothicus (A.D. 214-270) (not the Marcus Aurelius played by Richard Harris in Gladiator, but it's...
