In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

04 Nov

Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman, and Julian Barnes of the Wall Street Journal’s national security reporting team have a front page article today detailing the inside debates and, as the article says, policy changes around drone strikes in Pakistan over the several months.  It is a must-read for everyone who follows drone and targeted killing policy debates, and, I’m told, reflects months of reporting.  It is not a “here-is-the-leaked-document” kind of article, but instead a synthesis of many sources and an attempt to put together an account of months of debate and policy back-and-forth over how, when, who, and with whose permission to launch drone strikes in Pakistan’s territory.  
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04 Nov

Kevin Heller’s magisterial survey of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals offers the first comprehensive account of the trials, as well as an insightful analysis of the tribunals’ jurisprudence and legal basis. Heller is an international lawyer of considerable insight and his assessment of the trials is always judicious, frequently thought provoking, and, even if some scholars may quibble with this or...

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03 Nov

There is much to be analyzed in the Ninth Circuit's en banc decision in Sarei v. Rio Tinto. I am exercising a guest blogging privilege to address two aspects: its holding regarding the nature of the cause of action (and implicitly, the remedy) available under the ATS, and, the consequences of that holding to a proper understanding of the extension of that remedy...

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02 Nov

I have been raising various queries about the eurozone crisis and European governance - without making any claim to being an EU law scholar.  University of Connecticut's Peter Lindseth is just that, however, and points us to a relatively new blog, Eutopialaw.com, where he and a number of other experts post regularly on these topics.  I commend it to everyone,...

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02 Nov

On top of everything else, Congress now threatens to severely restrict official contacts with Iran.  This from Heather Hurlburt at Democracy Arsenal: If you're too transfixed by the prospect of the US losing its seat on the IAEA board of governors, losing Japanese funding through UNESCO for police training in Afghanistan, and potentially losing global patent protection, all...

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01 Nov

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to cancel her visit to London today for the much-hyped cybersecurity conference, which was designed to push back against Russian and Chinese proposals for an "International Code of Conduct for Information Security."  The Russian/Chinese proposal (co-authored with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) is widely undestood as part of an effort to (1) move Internet governance away...

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31 Oct

Although the twelve U.S. Nuremberg trials judged seven times as many defendants as the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and addressed a broader spectrum of international criminal law issues, including the first genocide prosecutions and the establishment of important principles of medical ethics, they have wallowed in comparative historical obscurity. The absence of meaningful coverage is ironic given, as Kevin...

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31 Oct

Today is an historic day in world population statistics, marking the day that planet reaches seven billion inhabitants. What is amazing is, despite the phenomenal growth in population, the citizens of the world are becoming healthier and wealthier every year. Gapminder has an incredibly interesting timeline that shows the progression of life expectancy (y axis) and income per...

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31 Oct

Opinio Juris and EJIL: Talk! are happy to announce that we will be hosting two joint book discussions. The first book is OJ's own Kevin Heller's The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford UP). That discussion starts today. We have a fantastic lineup of discussants, to whom we are most grateful for their time...

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