In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

16 Jan

This past week, Military Commission proceedings were "fired up" again in Guantanamo. In two cases, one against Canadian detainee Omar Khadr, the other against Yemeni detainee Ali Hamza Ahmad Sulayman al Bahlul, military defense lawyers confronted the challenge of dealing with a process long ago repudiated by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and by all accounts distinguished themselves (see...

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16 Jan

Today the nation celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. I studied Martin Luther King extensively prior to law school and have always admired him greatly. One of the most important legal questions King raised in his struggle for civil rights was the appropriate means to secure just ends. In particular, King was more than willing to defy laws if he deemed...

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15 Jan

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for an international conference on the Holocaust. A Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said, "Iran's Foreign Ministry has decided to hold a conference on the Holocaust to assess its scale by scientific means and discuss its consequences." The event will be sponsored by Iran and the Organization of the Islamic Conference "in consultation with other...

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14 Jan

On the final day of the Alito hearings, Julian Ku's colleague Professor Nora Demleitner at Hofstra School of Law testified on Judge Alito's immigration record. Demleitner was a clerk for Judge Alito and part of her testimony focused on one aspect of his immigration jurisprudence that has been ignored in my previous posts: gender as a basis for asylum law.Here...

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13 Jan

The U.S. has seemingly blocked two sales of military planes to Venezuela: one from Spain, and another from Brazil. In each case—turboprop trainers in the Brazilian case, and patrol planes in the Spanish case—the planes in question had U.S. military technology. As Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez complained this week:We couldn't sign the document. The contract is ready for Brazil to...

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12 Jan

As Peggy's earlier post indicated, MG Geoffrey Miller today asserted his privilege against self-incrimination in order to avoid being questioned by the defense attorney representing a soldier pending trial for using military working dogs to abuse prisoners. Is this significant?First, as we know from press reports, MG Miller made this decision on advice of his military defense counsel, Major Michelle...

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12 Jan

It's all Alito all the time here at Opinio Juris (OK, not quite. Thanks to Chris and Peggy for breaking the Alito obsession, but here I go again).Sen. Feinstein and Sen. Feingold questioned Alito again on the NSA wiretapping issue and invokes, once again, Justice Jackson's concurrence in Youngstown setting out a framework for analyzing presidential powers. A couple of...

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12 Jan

The Washington Post notes today that General Michael Miller, a former commander at the Guantanamo detention center who also assisted in setting up the center at Abu Ghraib, has invoked his right against self-incrimination and refused to give testimony in one of the military trials against a lower ranking soldier accused of abuse at Abu Ghraib:Harvey Volzer, an attorney for...

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12 Jan

Stunningly, Sen. Joe Biden has actually asked a good question: Can the President invade Iran without a declaration of war by Congress? (He claims that Professor "Ho" makes this argument. I assume he means Professor John Yoo of Berkeley).Somewhat surprisingly, Alito gives Biden a fairly complete answer, even though this will almost certainly come before the Court soon. He explains...

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11 Jan

Yesterday was not a stellar day for the law blog community. Here is what some of the most popular law blogs on the Internet were discussing: Volokh Conspiracy had a post that compared Ted Kennedy to Joseph McCarthy, Concurring Opinions had a post that had no less than 20 references to Jennifer Aniston nude, Professor Bainbridge had a post about...

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