In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

16 Apr

Last month, I was scheduled to attend Cyber Dialogue 2012 - What is Stewardship in Cyberspace? at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.  I was quite excited to attend given the line-up of participants with a truly diverse set of backgrounds and areas of expertise.  Unfortunately, despite nearly nine hours in the Philadelphia airport, I never made it...

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16 Apr

Daniel Klaidman, the journalist whose June 2012 book "Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency" looks to be a must-read, has sent in a guest post to Lawfare discussing how the Stephen Preston speech came about and a bit of the inside maneuvering around the succession of speeches by Eric Holder, Harold Koh,...

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16 Apr

Dean Paul Schiff Berman has a new book entitled Global Legal Pluralism (Cambridge University Press 2012) that I heartily recommend to our readers. Here's the abstract: We live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, supranational, and nonstate communities. Navigating these...

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16 Apr

Ben Davis sends me this update on the new evidence submitted to the International Criminal Court against the Catholic Church. Today, a survivor-led support group for sex abuse victims, which is under attack by U.S. Catholic officials, submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC) new and extensive documentation that the organization says shows ongoing child rape by Catholic clergy and continuing...

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16 Apr

Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla has admitted for the first time that the country's brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship "disappeared" leftist opponents and said babies were kidnapped from their parents. A team of six UN observers has gone to Syria, where despite both sides agreeing to a truce, violence is still raging. South Sudan has accused Sudan of indiscriminate bombing in a dispute...

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15 Apr

Those of you who, like me, missed this year's Federalist Society Symposium on National Security can now watch all of the events on-line here.  The event was held April 5 in DC and included a morning panel on terrorist-related detentions, interrogations and trials, a lunchtime address by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and an afternoon panel on potential cybersecurity...

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15 Apr

This is our second installment of this new feature, last week's announcements can be found here. Calls for Papers McGill University, Faculty of Law, has issued a call for papers for its conference "Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline" on September 27-28, 2012. Proposals are due on April 16, 2012. More information is here. The Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law...

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14 Apr

This week on Opinio Juris, Chris Borgen drew our attention to a NY Times op-ed explaining the surprising reason why in the grand bargain dividing the top posts at the World Bank and the IMF between the US and Europe, the US ended up with the World Bank rather than the IMF. Kevin Heller posted the abstract of his response in a mini-symposium of the Texas International Law Journal on Karl Chang’s article arguing that the law of neutrality provides the legal framework for the US conflict with Al-Qaeda. He also referred us to Lawfare for a discussion of the Al-Nashiri prosecution. In a throwback to the Cold War, he also quizzed us on a quote about Cuba following the controversy surrounding Miami Marlin’s manager Ozzie Guillen, and posted about Congressman West’s allegations about Democrats being members of the Communist Party. He also critiqued ICC Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo for undermining the OTP's credibility in Côte d'Ivoire. Peter Spiro wondered about the cautionary lessons for legal academics of “postparadigmism” in International Relations and discussed a European Court of Human Rights decision denying Greek non-resident citizens the right to vote in the Greek parliamentary elections from their foreign place of residence. Ken Anderson posted about a speech by the CIA’s General Counsel at Harvard Law School. In her post on this speech, Deborah Pearlstein discussed the authority for the CIA’s use of force under US constitutional law and the restraints on this use of force under international law.
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14 Apr

Moreno-Ocampo's inability to avoid allegations of bias has long haunted his tenure as Prosecutor.  It's impossible to forget, for example, photos of him standing next to the Ugandan President, Youweri Museveni, as he announced that he was investigating the situation in Northern Uganda -- an act that Ugandans widely perceived, rightly in light of the OTP's failure to seriously investigate...

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13 Apr

[Hannah L. Buxbaum is Interim Dean and John E. Schiller Chair in Legal Ethics, Indiana University Maurer School of Law.] This post is part of the Virginia Journal of International Law Symposium, Volume 52, Issues 1 and 2. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Thank you to Opinio Juris for hosting this online discussion and...

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13 Apr

[Marco Ventoruzzo is a Professor of Law at Pennsylvania State Dickinson School of Law.] This post is part of the Virginia Journal of International Law Symposium, Volume 52, Issues 1 and 2. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Thank you very much to Opinio Juris for hosting this online discussion of my recent Virginia Journal...

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