This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a book discussion on Informal International Lawmaking, a new volume edited by Joost Pauwelyn, Ramses Wessel and Jan Wouters, hot of the presses from OUP. In a post on the conceptual approaches adopted by the authors, Joost Pauwelyn explained what they mean by "informal" international lawmaking and what the book hopes to add to the debate on non-traditional forms...
Earlier this week, Harold Koh gave a speech. And it wasn't about conflicts, drones, or cyberwar, topics that have dominated the attention of international lawyers in recent years. Rather, Koh's speech was a meditation on the processes of international law-making that confront the State Department on a daily basis. It was, simply put, a survey of the current international legal landscape...
We are happy to announce that this Monday Professor Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School will join Opinio Juris as our newest member. Kristen’s articles range across a variety of topics in international law and, in particular, she has become a respected scholar regarding questions of the responsibility of international organizations and of states. She also writes...
Argentina, Australia, Luxembourg, Rwanda and South Korea have been elected for a two year term as UN Security Council members. They will replace Colombia, Germany, India, Portugal and South Africa from 1 January 2013. North Korea has threatened with violence if activists in South Korea release balloons with propaganda messages into North Korea next week. One day after a drone strike killed eight...
As Peter's post yesterday noted, there's a growing push to fundamentally re-align cyberspace governance via amendments to the ITU Regulations, which are set to be negotiated in December in Dubai. I'm not sure that the ITU is up to the task. But I do agree that the time is ripe for States and other stakeholders to agree on first principles...
[Jan Wouters is Professor of International Law and International Organizations, Jean Monnet Chair Ad Personam EU and Global Governance, and Director of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and Institute for International Law at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and Sanderijn Duquet is a Junior Member of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies.] We would like to take a moment to...
[Joost Pauwelyn is Professor of International Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.] Thank you to Professors David Zaring, Tai-Heng Cheng and Chris Brummer for their truly insightful and extremely helpful comments. Our book, and this discussion, is clearly only the beginning of a much longer debate on what,...
In a development that sounds (at least obliquely) in informal lawmaking, this from the very informative blog at The Hill: Representatives from Google, Cisco, Facebook, Microsoft and AT&T will join Obama administration officials at a December conference in Dubai to negotiate the terms of an international telecommunications treaty. The industry members are part of the 95-person delegation representing the United States as it...
[Chris Brummer is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center] Joost Pauwelyn, Ramses Wessel and Jan Wouters have assembled a remarkable cadre of leading intellectuals to tackle some of the toughest issues of international law—what explains informal international lawmaking, what are the legal questions flowing from it, and, as my comments will discuss, examining the key concept of accountability. With...
[Jan Wouters is Professor of International Law and International Organizations, Jean Monnet Chair Ad Personam EU and Global Governance, and Director of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and Institute for International Law at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven).] Once we conclude that IN-LAW is not devoid of impact and cannot be ignored as a normative process, the question...
The US and Israel are set to hold a joint missile exercise later this month, displaying their close cooperation in the face of Iran’s nuclear program development. Both Uganda and Rwanda have denied involvement with rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and call recent allegations by the UN “rubbish.” Russia has criticized the European Union for the recent sanctions it...
Jack Goldsmith offers five thoughts today at Lawfare about the D.C. Circuit's Hamdan II decision. I agree with two of his thoughts -- that the government is free to rely in future prosecutions on alternatives to material support (MST) such as aiding and abetting terrorism, and that (sadly) al-Bahlul could be detained indefinitely if he is ultimately acquitted by his...
