The Wall Street Journal's "Heard on the Street" column yesterday made an interesting comparison between sovereign bonds and corporate bonds. It pointed out that although in ordinary times, developed country sovereign debt is typically considered safer than corporate bonds of the same jurisdiction - the risk free rate of return, and the sovereign power to be able to tax, etc....
Yesterday the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, has unanimously embraced the doctrine of foreign affairs field preemption. It will surely prove to be a controversial blockbuster case for foreign affairs law, with or without Supreme Court review. The case of Movsesian v. Munich Re addressed a California statute, section 354.4, that authorized California courts to entertain various insurance claims brought...
I hadn't heard about this story, and I am still rather stunned to read that ...
We would like to open with a word of thanks to Opinio Juris, to our editors at the Yale Journal of International Law, and to the commentators who have agreed to participate in this discussion, for making this symposium possible. We are so grateful to be a part of this community. Our article, International Law at Home: Enforcing Treaties...
The Yale Journal of International Law (YJIL) is pleased to continue its partnership with Opinio Juris through this symposium. Today we will be discussing an Article by Oona A. Hathaway (Yale Law School), Sabria McElroy, and Sara Aronchick Solow, (both Yale Law School class of 2010) entitled International Law at Home: Enforcing Treaties in U.S. Courts and published in Vol....
Readers interested in watching Ben Wittes desperately try to spin British condemnation of the U.S. approach to the war on terror need only check out his post today on Rahmatullah. As I discussed a couple of months ago, the British Court of Appeals held that Rahmatullah was entitled to be released from U.S. custody because the U.S. had rendered him...
Last week the Fifth Circuit rendered a fascinating decision in McGee v. Arkel Int'l about choice-of-law rules as applied to torts in Iraq. I've never seen anything quite like the Iraqi law in question, so I thought it is worth sharing for the private international law aficionados among our readers. The Iraqi law in question, passed by the...
Various right-wing commentators, Mitt Romney, and dozens of congressmen have demanded that the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, be prosecuted for genocide for advocating (in one debatable translation) the destruction of Israel. I wonder if they will be quite so passionate about demanding a similar fate for Tucker Carlson, who earlier today openly advocated the destruction of Iran by the...
I'm not sure I approve of this trend: Legal claims can now be served via Facebook in Britain, after a landmark ruling in the English High Court. Mr Justice Teare gave the go-ahead for the social networking site to be used in a commercial case where there were difficulties locating one of the parties. Facebook is routinely used to serve claims in Australia...
My previous post mentioned battlefield robot analogs of dogs, cheetahs, pack animals, even humans. Now behold the synchronized nanobot swarm! Here's what national security analyst John Robb had to say about the tactical benefits of a battlefield drone swarm: •It cuts the enemy target off from supply and communications. •It adversely impacts the morale of the target. •It makes a coordinated defense extremely difficult (resource allocation is...
The New York Times Magazine has a story that is oddly depressing, on the one hand, and counter-intuitively optimistic, on the other - a report by Russell Shorto called simply, The Way Greeks Live Now (February 13, 2012). At the macro-level, things look unremittingly bleak; even if the latest deal reached last night holds, I don't think anyone believes it...
