Apparently, being named Charles and having vast military experience is all the rage in the blogosphere these days. Last week I mentioned Charles Blanchard's new blog. And this week I want to spruik Charles Dunlop's new(ish) blog, Lawfire. Charlie is a retired Major General in the US Air Force (where he served, inter alia, as Deputy Judge Advocate General) and currently serves as Executive...
[Dr. Mohamed Helal is an Assistant Professor of Law, Moritz College of Law & Affiliated Faculty, Mershon Center for International Security Studies – The Ohio State University. From 2002-2003 Dr. Helal was a member of the Cabinet of the Secretary-General of the Arab League, and from 2005-2009 he served on the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt,...
Last March, the ICRC released an updated Commentary on the First Geneva Convention of 1949 (GCI), the first installment of six new Commentaries aimed at bringing the interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols of 1977 to the 21st century. The updated Commentaries serve as an interpretive compass emerging from more than 60 years of application and interpretation of the...
The blog is a one-man show, and that man is Charles Blanchard -- former General Counsel of both the Air Force and the United States Army, current partner at Arnold & Porter in DC. The blog will focus on national-security law, which Chuck "define[s] pretty broadly -- to include topics such as climate change and immigration as well as defense policy." Recent posts...
I would like to thank Opinio Juris for hosting this symposium. Additionally, I would like to thank the distinguished contributors for their thoughtful and provocative posts. In this final post of the symposium, I offer a few brief responses to the contributors. Carmen Gonzalez hopes that activists will deploy the treaty supremacy rule in conjunction with the Convention on Elimination of...
[Paul Dubinsky is an Associate Professor of Law at Wayne State University School of Law.This is the eighth post in our symposium this week on treaty supremacy.] For those who have followed David Sloss’s work over the years, The Death of Treaty Supremacy is an eagerly anticipated arrival years in the making, and it does not disappoint. One finds in this volume,...
[This is the seventh post in our symposium this week on treaty supremacy.] I share with the preceding commentators’ praise of David Sloss’s book, The Death of Treaty Supremacy, and agree with their assessment that it is an important work of legal history and of doctrinal clarity on the question of treaty supremacy as a feature of federalism and the doctrine of...
[John Coyle is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. This is the sixth post in our symposium this week on treaty supremacy.] In his wonderful new book, The Death of Treaty Supremacy, David Sloss provides a highly readable and immaculately researched account of treaty supremacy doctrine. Although the book offers original insights into a great many...
[Thomas Lee is the Leitner Family Professor of International Law and the Director of Graduate and International Studies at Fordham Law School. This is the fifth post in our symposium this week on treaty supremacy.] Imagine Congress passes, and the President signs into law, a statute providing that the United States "undertakes to comply with the decision" of a bilateral US-China arbitral panel that the...
As has been widely reported, 17 international-law scholars -- including yours truly -- recently submitted a 105-page communication to the Office of the Prosecutor alleging that Australia's treatment of refugees involves the commission of multiple crimes against humanity, including imprisonment, torture, deportation, and persecution. The communication is a tremendous piece of work, prepared in large part by the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and...
[John Parry is the Associate Dean of Faculty and Edward Brunet Professor of Law at the Lewis & Clark Law School. This is the fourth post in our symposium this week on treaty supremacy.] David Sloss’s fantastic new book restores order and sanity to the confusion that pervades constitutional doctrine on the status of treaties. The great achievement of this book is...
[David P. Stewart is Professor from Practice at Georgetown University Law Center.This is the third post in our symposium this week on treaty supremacy.] How are we to explain the yawning gap between the Founding Fathers’ clearly “monist” ideas about the role of treaties in our domestic legal system and the much more circumscribed “dualist” concept reflected in the Supreme Court’s Medellin...
