In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

02 May

The media is reporting that the Obama administration is handling Usama bin Laden's remains in accordance with Islamic principles.  That decision is a stark reminder of why we are so fortunate that a Republican is no longer President.  When the Bush administration killed Uday and Qusay Hussein, recall, it infuriated Muslims and at least arguably violated the First Additional Protocol...

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01 May

Beyond confirming that Bin Laden was actually the person killed in Abottabad, what is the significance of troops being on the ground to conduct the Bin Laden Operation?  Can their presence lead us to the new #1 in al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri? In the coming days we will likely hear about the gathering of "pocket litter" and other exploitable intelligence and...

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01 May

Thanks to OJ for allowing me to guest blog for a bit.  I'm a law professor at Pepperdine, specializing in national security law and policy. First off, there is a lot of talk about this operation being a "human operation" involving special operations forces.  Some readers may assume that this meant there were no air assets involved (e.g. no Predators and...

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01 May

I'm sure most readers are aware that President Obama is about to announce that Osama Bin Laden has been killed, in a mansion outside of Islamabad, Pakistan.  I'm just going to leave this as an open thread.  I'm not quite sure what the international law aspects of this will turn out to be, as we have no details at this...

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29 Apr

Let me thank Fernanda, Francesca, and Ken for their tremendously thoughtful comments on my new book, Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State (OUP 2010). And let me also thank once again everyone at Opinio Juris for providing space for this discussion. I hope the readers have found the exercise as stimulating and enjoyable as I have. It was Giandomenico...

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29 Apr

I did not want to let the opportunity slip by to offer one comment on Peter Lindseth's fine book - but not from the standpoint of the EU, on which I am not an expert.  Instead, I wanted to comment and commend the discussion of legitimacy in the book, both early in an abstract sense and throughout the text in...

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29 Apr

Honestly, he does.  The email doesn't lie: Attention, Beneficiary Due to the petitions received by the UN, I Secretary-General Ban ki-moon from all over the continent in regards to the fraudulent activities going on in the West Africa sub-region with security's agent and diplomats who has been delaying people's funds, consignment and valuables in their custody and demand outrageous fees to get...

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28 Apr

Thanks to Roger and everyone at Opinio Juris for giving me this opportunity to pen some thoughts about law journal submissions. I hope to provide an inside look at how the sausage is made—and in so doing, shed light on some trends evident from our side that might be less apparent from your side. Because journals treat submissions practices like...

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28 Apr

Opinio Juris is pleased to announce that James Tierney will be guest blogging with us for the next few days. James is the outgoing Executive Articles and Book Reviews Editor for the University of Chicago Law Review. He will blog about his perspectives on the law review submission process, with particular attention given to international law scholarship in...

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28 Apr

In the ever-expanding world of international law scholars who become influential deans, George Washington University School of Law announced today that Paul Schiff Berman, Dean at Arizona State, will be the new dean at GWU. "GW Law School is obviously already one of the top law schools in the country, but it is far more than that,” Mr. Berman said....

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28 Apr

I've been on a self-imposed blogging hiatus of late due to the dual demands of serving as Temple's Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and editing the forthcoming book, The Oxford Guide to Treaties (on which I'll blog more later).   But, I had to pass along the following significant and important development -- Superman is renouncing his U.S. citizenship.  Here's the scoop...

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27 Apr

Faithful readers of this blog - I mean, very faithful readers, the ones who read every post - perhaps know that I have been interested for a long time in a debate that lurks in the background to the debates over targeted killing and drone warfare.  This background debate (one of several important ones embedded in the targeted killing arguments) is whether there is a "legal geography of war."  That's a term I invented for this paper, but it goes to the question of where and when the laws of war apply, and where it is instead just the Laws of Ordinary Life, in the context of targeted killing. I've written a new, short, non-technical, general audience, and no-notes paper that in final form will be published online by the Hoover Task Force on National Security and Law, of which I'm a member.  I have just posted the working version of the paper to SSRN.  Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare: How We Came to Debate Whether There Is a 'Legal Geography of War'. I give my own view in a non-technical way, along with discussion of NIAC and self-defense and other things - but in this essay I'm much more interested in giving my sense of how the debate evolved among various interlocutors over the past ten years. Abstract is below the fold.
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