Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin has given up his US citizenship in the run-up to the Facebook IPO. Not that it didn't cost him. High net-worth folks like Saverin have to pay what is in effect an exit tax, under the mis-acronymed HEART Act. Under this 2008 legislation, renunciation is treated like a tax event, at which point your assets will...
This week Opinio Juris is hosting a discussion on Laura Dickinson's book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Professor Dickinson is the Oswald Symister Colclough Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School in Washington DC. Her book addresses issues related to the increasing privatization of foreign policy functions of...
[Ruti Teitel is Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law at New York Law School and the author of Humanity’s Law (Oxford University Press 2011).] Sam Moyn, writing in this Sunday’s New York Times (“Human Rights, Not So Pure Anymore”) claims the current relationship of human rights is compromised, and nostalgizes the past. As he puts it: [T]he whole idea of human rights has...
In honor of Mother's Day yesterday, Foreign Policy offers some insight into the top countries who score the best on Save The Children's State of the World's Mothers report. The Dalai Lama told Britain's The Telegraph he was warned that China may have tried to kill him, in a plot involving two Tibetan females with poison in their hair and on their...
My recent post on PhDs calling themselves "Dr." led one of my e-friends, Martin Holterman, to remind me that I had promised to post about my dissertation defense -- called a "viva" in the Netherlands -- at Leiden University last year. The viva was one of the greatest academic experiences of my life, so I'm happy to rectify my omission. I'll...
Walter Olson at Cato has a sharp observation here at the Daily Caller, on the revolving door between U.S. international law professoriate and various UN bodies. Mr. Anaya, the U.N. rapporteur, was sent on his mission by none other than the U.N. Human Rights Council, notorious, as Doug Bandow has written, for being “dominated by human rights abusers and their enablers.” (Fidel...
Following on Ken’s most recent post on autonomous battlefield robots, I came across the short story Malak by Peter Watts (you can read it here). What jumped out at me was a short story that beginning with epigrams such as these: “An ethically-infallible machine ought not to be the goal. Our goal should be to design a machine that performs better...
Last week’s announcements can be found here. If you are organizing a conference or other event and would like to see the call for papers or the program announced on Opinio Juris, please contact us. Calls for Papers Tel Aviv University is hosting a conference entitled: Migration and Well-Being: Research Frontiers, to take place January 8-10, 2013. Up to 500-word abstract submissions must be in no later than...
[Leila Hanafi works as regional coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the Coalition for the International Criminal Court. This contribution is cross-posted at the Middle East Monitor.] The ongoing post-conflict reconstruction process in Libya is reigniting a crucial debate among transitional justice advocates as to the role the International Criminal Court (ICC) can play in delivering justice and...
This week on Opinio Juris, Kevin Jon Heller posted on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s refusal to participate in his Military Commission trial, on the censored time-delayed video and audio feed from the trial and on the irony of an op-ed complaining about "false information about the detention" in the media coverage. Deborah Pearlstein addressed the question whether things might have gone...
Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA officer who describes the Bush administration's systematic torture regime as people "putting their big boy pants on" and who personally destroyed 92 videotapes documenting the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah because "out of context they would make us look terrible," has an op-ed for CNN today complaining about media coverage of the...
