The following is a guest-post by Steve Vladeck, Professor of Law at American University. Our thanks to him for contributing it. The Espionage Act, the Documents/Information Distinction, and the Press I’ve been following (with great interest) the exchange between Roger, Kevin, and those who have commented on their posts concerning Julian Assange, the Espionage Act, and the broader question of...
From an interview with Jennifer Rubin, a new conservative blogger on the WaPo: Bolton has begun to talk openly to conservative gatherings and media about his interest in a 2012 presidential run. "I'm seriously considering it," he told me in an interview, in large part because of the "lack of foreign policy debate." Having gotten past the idle...
I had a colleague ask an interesting question, "If Julian Assange is indicted and detained in London, would the U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty authorize extradition to the United States?" There's not an easy answer. The U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty requires "double-criminality"--the offense must be punishable in both States. Not surprisingly, the United Kingdom imposes criminal penalties for disclosing state...
I am delighted to announce that Stanford University Press has now published The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law, which I edited with the University of Toronto's Markus Dubber. The book contains chapters on the substantive criminal law of 16 different countries, including some on which there has been little English-language scholarship, such as Iran, Egypt, China, and Argentina. ...
That's the excellent question asked by Ian, one of the commenters on Roger's recent post. The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Le Monde, and El Pais -- all are just as guilty of violating the Espionage Act as WikiLeaks. There is no "we redacted some of the documents" defense in the Act, and prosecuting a news organization after...
Peter's posts on how Wikileaks actually makes the US and its diplomatic service look fairly good are spot on. The Foreign Service looks a lot more interesting now that I know I get to spy for the U.S., too! But as this article from Slate notes, Secretary Hillary Clinton made it official State Department policy ("The "National Human Intelligence Directive on...
The Wikileaks episode seems to be turning to the USG's advantage, at least domestically: it's provoking a lot of sympathy for the government as an entity. That's a rare sentiment these days. Leave aside angry calls for Assange's head (almost literally), people are actually feeling sorry for the USG. One way that's being expressed is to compare the government to private...
Harold Koh has warned Wikileaks of the dire consequences to the United States resulting from the publication of over 250,000 classified documents. But I doubt that Julian Assange and Wikileaks cares much about the damage done to our nation from this breach. What they presumably do care about is criminal prosecution. As Marc Thiessen at the Washington...
I suspect this will be a much bigger story than the previous Iraq and Afghanistan disclosures, mostly because there will be something here for everyone. I'm not sure that the State Department looks particularly bad, as Timothy Garten Ash explains. It shouldn't be a revelation to anyone that diplomats sometimes do something that looks like spying. This is much more...
I am grateful to Professor Van Schaack for her thoughtful and considered response. It strikes me as an entirely fair criticism that – albeit in a short commentary focusing on the standards governing the use of force by governments – I neglected to explore fully issues of combatant status in non-international armed conflicts and, more interestingly, belligerent nexus issues. The...
[Beth Van Schaack is an Associate Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and contributor to IntLawGrrls.] Professor Guilfoyle’s article makes a discrete and important contribution to his growing body of work on maritime law and the problem of piracy in the Gulf of Aden. The article cogently argues that international humanitarian law (‘IHL’) does not apply to most instances...
[Dr Douglas Guilfoyle is a Lecturer in Law at the Faculty of Laws, University College London.] It is sometimes suggested that because pirates were described by classical authors as hostes humani generis (enemies of humankind) or because the Security Council has authorised the use of ‘necessary means’ in repressing Somali piracy that the laws of armed conflict ('LOAC') must (or might)...
