More than a decade ago, the U.S. Defense Department's Office of General Counsel (DoD OGC) released a detailed analysis of the way international law would operate to guide U.S. military activity in cyberspace. It was an impressive effort and is still worth reading today despite all the intervening, and dramatic, changes in the technology and the geopolitical landscape. At the...
My future Notre Dame colleague Mary Ellen O'Connell joins the fray criticizing Harold Koh's crabbed definition of hostilities. Here's a taste: Harold Koh, legal adviser to the U.S. State Department, attempted to convince Congress on June 15 that the "limited nature" of U.S. military operations in Libya are not "hostilities" as envisioned in the War Powers Resolution, and, therefore,...
The controversy over the Administration's interpretation of the War Powers Resolution has some people conflating that issue with the broader one of when the President can use force without congressional authorization. This isn't surprising, since the Administration has used a similar tack in both contexts. With respect to the War Powers Resolution, the Administration claims the Libya operation does not constitute...
If you had been thinking about submitting a paper or a panel proposal for the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law but had missed the deadline, despair not! The deadline has been extended to this Friday, June 24th. The webpage for submissions is here. And, in case you hadn't seen it already, this is the theme statement...
Apologies for the light blogging the past couple of weeks -- although the upside is that I am now officially Dr. Heller, having successfully defended my dissertation at Leiden University in the Netherlands a few days ago. It was an amazing (and amazingly formal) experience, and I'll blog about it once I get the official photos from the university. I've been...
I'm on vacation in God's Own Country, the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where I am going almost wholly offline. One or two vital emails, but basically no blogging, websurfing, mindlessly hitting link buttons. I'm going to break my addiction to restless, pointless web cruising, and here in the land of perfect light - hiking, biking, a great gym, the Sierra Nevada...
The Supreme yesterday gave the green light to an individual asserting a Tenth Amendment defense in a criminal prosecution under a federal statute enacted pursuant to the Chemical Weapons Convention (Bond v. United States). The facts of the case are certainly more lurid than our run-of-the-mine foreign relations law cases. The basic claim: the Treaty Power doesn't add anything to...
The D.C. Circuit held this week that torture by non-state actors was not actionable under the Alien Tort Statute. The case, Ali Shafi v. Palestinian Authority, arose from the alleged torture in the West Bank by the Palestinian Authority and the PLO of a Palestinian national who was an Israeli spy. The Shafis argue that “the [Palestinian Authority's] conduct...
Here is the Administration's legal analysis (in full) of why the 60/90-day clock of the War Powers Resolution doesn't apply to the continuing Libya operation: The President is of the view that the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require further congressional authorization, because U.S. military operations are...
The Wall Street Journal national security reporting team, followed closely by the Washington Post and the AP, have been reporting in the last couple of days on the CIA being tasked to carry out an expanded Predator drone targeted killing program in Yemen. I’ve been meaning to blog on this, following on Deborah's post below discussing the AP story, but...
Some of you will recall the series of posts a few weeks back about the new authorization for use of military force (AUMF) legislation that the House of Representatives debated and passed at the end of May. Among other things, the bill would prohibit the use of Defense Department funds to transfer Guantanamo detainees to the United States for...
For those who follow these topics, two items of note. First, an AP story today reports that the United States is building a secret CIA air base in the Persian Gulf region to support U.S. targeting operations in Yemen. The story is sourced to anonymous government officials, and reports that “U.S. forces have stepped up their targeting as well, because...
