[Dire Tladi is a Professor of International Law at the University of Pretoria.] Introduction I first met Harold Hongju Koh in 2009 at a retreat on the definition of the crime of aggression for the purposes of the Rome Statute just outside New York. From my first engagement with him, I immediately knew two things about the man. First, our approaches to...
[Stephen Pomper is a non-resident senior fellow at Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute and New York University Law School's Center for Law and Security, and served in a range of U.S. government legal and policy roles from 2002 through 2016. The post is written in his personal capacity and draws on research conducted as a Senior Policy Scholar at...
[Jenny E. Goldschmidt is an Emeritus Professor in Human Rights Law at Utrecht University and a Member of the International Commission of Jurists.] The Dutch newspapers mentioned the cynical laughter that emerged last week in the United Nations’ General Assembly when Donald Trump was speaking about all the achievements of the United States, achieved of course due to his administration. It seems...
[Shaheed Fatima, Q.C., is is a London-based barrister, practicing from Blackstone Chambers.] In ‘The Trump Administration and International Law’ Professor Harold Hongju Koh diagnoses the multiple threats to domestic and international institutions and norms posed by the current administration’s foreign policy approach; prescribes a ‘political counterstrategy’ based on transnational legal process which may be applied by a range of players, with the...
[Jean Galbraith is a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.] What is the Trump Administration doing to U.S. foreign policy and more generally to the world? In his new book, The Trump Administration and International Law, Harold Hongju Koh tackles this question in a way that manages to be both deep and accessible, a scholarly accounting and...
[Sue Biniaz served for over thirty years in the State Department’s Legal Adviser’s Office, where she was a Deputy Legal Adviser, as well as the lead climate lawyer and a lead climate negotiator from 1989 until early 2017. She is now a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation and an adjunct faculty member at Columbia Law School.] As usual, Harold has...
[Sean D. Murphy is the Manatt/Ahn Professor of International Law at George Washington University.] Harold Hongju Koh has produced an unabashedly progressive manifesto that seeks to explain why it is that many of the initiatives of the early Donald Trump administration relating to transnational affairs have not achieved their objectives, while simultaneously laying out a “counterstrategy of resistance.” To this end, Koh employs...
[Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. He returned to Yale in January 2013 after serving for nearly four years as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.] The editors of the rebooted Opinio Juris 2.0 and the International Commission of Jurists are most gracious to hold this impressive symposium on my...
To celebrate the launch of our new website and new members, Opinio Juris will be holding a symposium over the next two weeks on Harold Hongju Koh's new book, The Trump Administration and International Law, which was just published by Oxford University Press. (You can get a 20% discount by clicking on the OUP advertisement to the right of this...
In 2004, three friends and legal scholars – Peggy McGuiness, Chris Borgen, and Julian Ku – started Opinio Juris, the first blog dedicated to the informed discussion of international law. In 2006, the blog took on its first two non-founding members, Roger Alford and Kevin Jon Heller. Over the past 14 years new voices came and (to a much lesser...
The start of a new school year is a time for transitions and it is no different for Opinio Juris. Since founding the website fourteen years ago with Peggy and Julian, Opinio Juris has surpassed all of our original hopes with the additions of Roger, Kevin, Duncan, Peter, Ken, Deborah, Kristen and Jens. Each new member brought a unique perspective...
[Priya Pillai is a lawyer and international law specialist, with expertise in the areas of international justice, international human rights, transitional justice, peace and conflict, and humanitarian issues.] Marking a year since the recent exodus of Rohingya from Rakhine state to Bangladesh, the U.N. Human Rights Council mandated Independent International Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) released its final report on 18 September 2018....