Perhaps my favorite scene in the film Zero Dark Thirty comes relatively early on, when the two CIA interrogators around whom the early film revolves arrive at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan to interrogate their next detainees. The soldiers on the base have been keeping a cage of small monkeys (for unexplained reasons), and the scene opens with...
India has accused Pakistan of killing two of Indian soldiers in the disputed region of Kashmir, but Pakistan has denied any involvement and its media are playing down the incident. Hugo Chavez is too ill to be sworn in for his new term as President of Venezuela, raising a whole raft of constitutional questions. A military judge hearing the case against Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks affair...
My friend Luc Reydams, who teaches at Notre Dame (which clearly has a better faculty than football team...
There are a variety of ways one can measure the growing importance of international law scholarship. One metric that I have never seen discussed is simple: how often has the term “international law” been used in academic scholarship? Using Westlaw’s JLR library I calculated how often “international law” was referenced from 1987 to 2011. The results...
A U.S. drone strike killed eight people in northwestern Pakistan, the latest in a series of drone attacks that come as a retired U.S. general Stanley McChrystal warns their overuse may threaten American foreign policy goals. The trial of former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic resumed in The Hague on Monday. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has asked that government-issued documents, such as...
[William S. Dodge is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. From August 2011 to July 2012, he served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on immunity matters. The views expressed here are his own and do not...
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad rejected peace talks with his enemies in a defiant speech that his opponents described as a renewed declaration of war. Foreign Affairs officials in the EU, UK and Turkey have responded sceptically and have called on Assad to step down. A U.S. drone strike killed at least 10 people suspected to be Taliban fighters in Pakistan's northern tribal areas, intelligence sources said, days...
[Eugene Kontorovich is Professor of Law at Northwestern Law. This post is cross-posted at The Volokh Conspiracy] In response to my post about Turkey's settlements, Kevin Jon Heller argues that from the perspective of International Criminal Court liability for "indirectly...
Eugene Kontorovich argues today at Volokh Conspiracy that Israel could minimize the likelihood of an ICC investigation into its transfer of Israeli civilians into the West Bank by emphasizing Turkey's similar transfer of Turkish civilians into Northern Cyprus, which it has been illegally occupying for more than four decades. Here are the key paragraphs: Cyprus was a state with clear borders...
Upcoming Events On January 10-11, 2013, The T.M.C. Asser Instituut and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague, in cooperation with the International Humanitarian and Criminal Law Platform, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the Municipality of The Hague and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will host a symposium entitled The Boundaries of the Battlefield: A Critical Look at the Legal Paradigms and Rules in...
The (short and unassuming) essay is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication, which is being edited by Cesare Romano, Karen Alter, and Yuval Shany and should be published by OUP this year. Here is the abstract: The role of the international prosecutor is uniquely challenging. Unlike domestic prosecutors, who normally have the material resources to prosecute all of the serious crimes...
Over the holidays here at Opinio Juris, the comments section of Kevin's post on the distinction between the legality and the morality of drone strikes was a hive of activity. The post itself was a follow-up to a first post in which Kevin applied a comparative criminal law lens to argue that under the broader understanding of intent prevailing outside...
