It’s always fun to find new ways to apply the Coase Theorem, particularly in situations of international relations and law. So, we’ve seen it raised as a way of talking about bribing Libyan generals not to fight, how to avoid war over conflicting economic claims in the South China Sea, and lots of other situations. There’s something useful about seeing...
[Sarah Kendzior is an instructor at Washington University in Saint Louis. Follow her on Twitter @sarahkendzior] Kony2012 rose and fell on the power of celebrity. “We want to make Kony famous”, Invisible Children proclaimed, and it did, enlisting the support of twenty “culture-makers” to spread the word that an African child-killer was still at large. Kony2012 is often touted as an example of...
[Jay Milbrandt is the Director of the Global Justice Program at Pepperdine University School of Law. Jay is the author of the recent book Go and Do: Daring to Change the World One Story at a Time. You can connect with Jay on his blog or on Twitter @JayMilbrandt] I was the target market for Kony 2012. I’m a connected, engaged Millennial. ...
If last week's post about ASIL's 2nd Annual Research Forum at the University of Georgia Law School on October 20-21 was too short notice, don't despair. We have been informed that the deadline has been extended until Monday, April 23. The Research Forum, a Society initiative introduced in 2011, aims to provide a setting for the presentation and focused discussion of...
[Charli Carpenter is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She blogs at Duck of Minerva.] One of the most curious aspects of the Kony2012 campaign is its backing by an important and powerful public servant, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. In publicly endorsing the campaign, Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, has espoused a powerful causal...
An Italian kidnapped by al-Qaeda insurgents in Algeria and held for 14 months has been freed in northern Mali. Denmark has established a Commission of Inquiry into its role in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. EJIL has an in-depth post about it here. The Arab League has urged Syria to implement the ceasefire plan after being briefed by Kofi Annan. The definition of piracy...
Opinio Juris is pleased to announce an online symposium addressing social activism and international law. As our readers know, Kony 2012 was a YouTube sensation, spreading faster than any video in history. Although the details are airbrushed, the central theme of the video is about international law. The key idea of the video is that the indicted fugitive Joseph Kony...
I've been following the standoff between the Philippines Navy and Chinese "surveillance" ships in the South China Sea (or West Philippines Sea) with some concern. As I noted here, China has some rather expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea that countries like the Philippines are resisting. But given the relative sizes of their navies, it is obvious that...
The answers to my questions last week were no further away than the latest copy of the AJIL and an important article by Emilie Hafner-Burton, David Victor, and Yonatan Lupu on Political Science Research and International Law: The State of the Field. This is a must-read for anyone interested in IR/IL, past and future. As for the "war on paradigms", it has...
Michigan Law Review is out with its Annual Survey of Books in the law, and while the self-promotion is awkward at the least, it feels a bit more in the interest of full disclosure (given what I’ve blogged about here in the past) to note that the issue includes my review of Ben Wittes’ latest book, Detention and Denial. A...
The US-backed Korean-American Jim Yong Kim was named the next president of the World Bank, in a move that drew criticism about the purported dominance of the post by the United States. The Philippines will take its dispute with China in the South China Sea to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). Meanwhile, Tokyo's governor wants to use public fund to purchase...
I have no idea whether it's true, but that's what the BBC is reporting: The International Criminal Court could soon drop its demand that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi be transferred to the Hague for trial, officials have told the BBC. They say the most prominent son of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi could instead be tried inside Libya but under the supervision...
