In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

16 Apr

Oral arguments began yesterday at the ICJ in the Thailand-Cambodia border dispute about land surrounding the Temple Vihear, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Syrian warplanes have launched further attacks in Damascus in addition to a handful of other rebel-held Syrian cities. Heads of the World Health Organization and UNICEF made a rare political plea to the international community yesterday stating that intervention...

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15 Apr

Apparently, the answer is yes, according to Professor Jeremi Suri of the University of Texas writing in the New York Times: The Korean crisis has now become a strategic threat to America’s core national interests. The best option is to destroy the North Korean missile on the ground before it is launched. The United States should use a precise airstrike to...

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15 Apr

As North Korea celebrated the 101st birthday of the country's founder, the US has said it is ready to "reach out" if Pyongyang gives up its nuclear aspirations after warning North Korea that a nuclear missile launch would be a "huge mistake."  Foreign Policy offers a way to solve the North Korea nuke problem, opining that the road to Pyongyang goes...

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14 Apr

Calls for papers In case you haven't seen it yet, we have launched our own call for papers aimed at LL.M, Ph.D and S.J.D. students as well as those practitioners/academics within the first five years post-degree to participate in our New Voices symposium starting in July. The deadline for 200-word abstract submissions is May 1, 2013. Vermont Law School will host the fourth-annual Colloquium on...

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13 Apr

Last November, two documents appeared within a few days of each other, each addressing the emerging legal and policy issues of autonomous weapon systems - and taking strongly incompatible approaches.  One was from Human Rights Watch, whose report, Losing Our Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots, made a sweeping, provocative call for an international treaty ban on the use, production,...

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13 Apr

This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a symposium on the latest issues of the Leiden Journal of International Law, introduced here by Dov Jacobs. The first article, On the Functions of International Courts: An Appraisal in Light of Their Burgeoning Public Authority by Armin von Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke, discussed the functions of international courts in the international legal order beyond their traditional dispute settlement...

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12 Apr

[Jonathan Horowitz is writing in his personal capacity. He is the Associate Legal Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative’s National Security and Counterterrorism Program and Naz K. Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at the HLS-Brookings Project on Law and Security at Harvard Law School, where she leads the Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement initiative.] Part I of the series can be...

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12 Apr

The US says with "moderate confidence" that North Korea does in fact have a nuclear weapon that they would be capable of mounting to a ballistic missile, but that such a weapon would likely be unreliable. At the G8 summit in London, leaders were "appalled" by the violence and number of casualties in Syria and urged humanitarian assistance from all countries. During...

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12 Apr

Today (April 12) St. John's Law School of Law is hosting a conference in New York  in cooperation with NATO's Allied Command Transformation group entitled Cyberconflict: Threats, Responses and the Rule of Law. The conference brings together experts from the armed forces, academia, and law enforcement to consider issues at the intersection of technology, law enforcement, national security, civil liberties...

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11 Apr

Pierre N. Leval, a well-respected judge who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, has published a full-scale no-holds-barred policy defense of the Alien Tort Statute in Foreign Affairs.   The essay, which is adapted from his lecture to the New York City Bar Association, offers the standard argument in favor of the...

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11 Apr

Internal debate inside the Administration must be heating up, because someone in D.C. is in a leaky mood. McClatchy yesterday released a story on U.S. targeting operations billed as the “first independent evaluation of internal U.S. intelligence accounting” of such operations. The report is based substantially on classified reports covering most (not all) of the drone strikes carried out by the...

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11 Apr

[Jonathan Horowitz is writing in his personal capacity. He is the Associate Legal Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative’s National Security and Counterterrorism Program and Naz K. Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at the HLS-Brookings Project on Law and Security at Harvard Law School, where she leads the Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement initiative.] Introduction: This is the first in a two-part series...

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