In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

20 Apr

[Natia Kalandarishvili-Mueller is a Lecturer in Humanitarian Law at Tbilisi State University, Institute of International Law, Faculty of Law, and a PhD Candidate at the University of Essex, School of Law. The views expressed in the post are that of the author only.] Russia still occupies twenty percent of Georgian territory. On 24 November 2014, the Russian Federation and Abkhazia, one of...

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20 Apr

Africa Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir will travel to Indonesia on Monday for a summit, Sudan's foreign ministry said, in his first trip outside of Africa or the Middle East in nearly four years. **UPDATE** Al-Bashir cancelled his trip to Indonesia, sources say, based on not receiving permission from several states to fly over their airspace en route to Jakarta. Two Kenyans...

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19 Apr

Calls for Papers Call for papers for ‘The Latin American Challenge to the Current System of Investor-State Dispute Settlement’ will analyze current developments and the proposed design of UNASUR’s investment dispute settlement centre, as an example of the Latin American ‘challenge’ to investment arbitration and place it within the wider context of reform of investor-state dispute settlement as evidenced elsewhere in the ...

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17 Apr

I am slammed with a couple of projects right now, but I can't help throwing this question out to the legal blogosphere.  Does the new "Bipartisan Trade Priorities and Accountability Act" recently introduced by leading U.S. Senators violate the U.S. Constitution's bicameralism and presentment requirements as stated by the U.S. Supreme Court in INS v. Chadha? The BTPAA seems crucial as...

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16 Apr

I'm one of them. Here is the text of the letter: To Whom It May Concern, A recent petition at NYU urges people to express "no confidence" in the Law School's invitation to Harold Hongju Koh to teach international human rights law this semester. We understand that this petition is motivated by Professor Koh's recent service as Legal Adviser to the U.S....

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14 Apr

Among my many hobby-horses is a  fascination with the role of the individual American states in the interpretation and implementation of international law within the U.S.  In past work, for instance, I have argued that states can individually implement treaties via guidance from Uniform Laws. I had a few examples of this phenomenon in my article, and I think it will...

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13 Apr

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Kenya has given the United Nations three months to remove a camp housing more than half a million Somali refugees, as part of a get-tough response to the killing of 148 people by Somali gunmen at a Kenyan university. Middle East and Northern Africa An Egyptian court's decision to...

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12 Apr

Events On April 13-14, 2015, the University of Alabama School of Law will host a workshop and symposium event on the topic of the Rights of States in International Law.  The event will be organized by Professor Dan Joyner. The participants will workshop their papers, which are to comprise a special issue of the Cambridge Journal of International & Comparative Law, which is being...

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11 Apr

This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a Book Symposium on Interpretation in International Law. The Symposium was introduced by Daniel Peat and Matthew Windsor who offered the framework and context of the book in describing their introductory chapter (available here), explaining that the idea of interpretation in their work centers around the metaphor of a game, with each of the authors...

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10 Apr

[Philip Allott is Emeritus Professor of International Public Law at the University of Cambridge.] Interpretation of any text – religious, political, historical, scientific, literary, artistic, legal – raises profound philosophical problems. Interpretation of a legal text is in a class of its own, because it can have direct and substantial social effects, determining people’s lives. The philosophy of legal interpretation is...

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09 Apr

[Fuad Zarbiyev is an Associate in the International Arbitration Group of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP.] The interpretation discourse in modern international law is dominated by a textualist paradigm. This claim may seem empirically wrong if it is taken to mean that nothing other than eo nomine textual arguments features in the international legal discourse. After all, the interpretive regime...

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