Although I've only been a regular OJ blogger for two years now, I feel like I've known OJ since it was born. Chris Borgen, Julian Ku and I have been friends since we all worked together at Debevoise and Plimpton in New York years ago. Over the years I've gotten to know Peggy, Roger, Ken, Deborah, Duncan, and at least by...
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo certainly thinks so: Which brings us back to Roger Ver, variously known as a "Bitcoin entrepreneur" or the "Bitcoin Jesus." Ver is now a citizen of Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. He was so excited about avoiding taxes that as soon as he became a Nevisian he set up yet another start up that...
For 10 years, Opinio Juris has served as a forum for short-form legal scholarship. Many posts were short and simple, quickly flagging a particular development or issue and bringing it to the attention of international lawyers across the globe. But other posts were far more in depth, analyzing a complex legal issue with great subtlety and persuasion. What strikes me...
I published my first post on Opinio Juris on February 10, 2006. That was almost nine years ago, and although I do not have exact figures, I estimate that I've written around 1,800 posts and close to a million words on the blog since. And my lifetime numbers are actually even a bit higher -- beginning in August 2004, I blogged for a while...
When Peter Spiro wrote to ask me back in 2007 whether I might be interested in writing a response to then-State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger’s posts on the blog, Opinio Juris, I had two nearly simultaneous reactions: (1) The U.S. State Department Legal Adviser was writing on a blog?!; and (2) Yes. I am, as I take it...
In a comment to a recent post, Patrick O’Donnell noted a post from the first year of Opinio Juris in which I had taken a crack at starting a list of the “must reads “of international law. I wanted to get a discussion going over what should be the key scholarly texts in our field. Opinio Juris readers made significant...
When Chris, Julian and I started our modest “conversation” about international law ten year ago, we were not universally praised. Nor were we instantly accepted. Who did we think we were, we pre-tenure punks just starting out in this field? And what were people to make of this short-form, internet-based content? As Chris noted, we really didn’t know what we...
One of my first posts with Opinio Juris remains one of my all time favorites -- Strawberries versus Skin Cancer. Looking back, that post marked a transition point for me as a scholar and an academic; in it, I began to allow myself to think more critically about my former employer, the U.S. State Department, even as I remained loyal to...
You know you’ve reached a certain age when you start saying, “I remember when. . .” Well, I remember when international law was considered a legal chimera and an academic backwater. Policymakers would take it into account in only a limited set of circumstances, and then usually only where it was consistent with other agendas. In law schools it was ghettoized:...
I started blogging at Opinio Juris in June 2005. My first post was a postcard from India. Since that time I have published over 1,000 posts. During that same ten-year period I have also published dozens of articles and a few books. In light of that background, I thought I would use Opinio Juris’ ten-year anniversary...
I want to mark our Opinio Juris anniversary with some musings on how the legal blogosphere has changed in the decade since Chris, Peggy, and I launched this site. When we began, there was already a pretty robust universe of legal blogs. But law blogs were still pretty much hobbies rather than serious professional publications. Chris, Peggy and I were writing for each...
It may be hard to believe, but this week Opinio Juris is celebrating its tenth anniversary. In a placeholder post prior to our commencing regular blogging, Peggy, Julian, and I had explained: Our modest goal is to share with our readers a variety of perspectives on the role of international law in the U.S. and around the globe and to stimulate...
