Recent Posts

Carolyn Evans New Dean of Melbourne Law School

I am delighted to announce that my colleague Carolyn Evans has been appointed Dean of the Melbourne Law School -- the first female Dean in the law school's history.  Carolyn is one of the world's leading law and religion scholars, as her biography attests: Carolyn has degrees in Arts and Law from Melbourne University and a doctorate from Oxford University...

The Al-Aulaqi Hearing

Probably many readers have seen this over at Lawfare, but Ben Wittes has a very interesting account of the oral argument from a few days ago on the Al-Aulaqi targeted killing lawsuit.  A snippet: Judge Bates was deeply engaged with counsel for both sides throughout the argument. At the hearing’s end (shortly after I had left), he made clear that his...

In Honor of the 35th Anniversary of Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars

I'm at Penn Station, waiting for the train from New York City back to DC, happy but slightly dazed after an intense three day conference in celebration of the 35th anniversary of Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars.  My thanks and congratulations to Gabby Blum, Ian Scobbie, and Joe Weiler for organizing it, and to NYU for hosting it.  I...

Obama Endorses India to Join Security Council as Permanent Member, and a Note on State Disaggregation and the Global New Class

News services are reporting that President Obama, speaking to the Indian Parliament, has endorsed India receiving a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.  The AP story adds that this was the biggest applause line in the speech, fully consonant with the rise of Indian nationalism within India, and its rapidly increasing sense of importance in the broader world.  What of this nationalism?  And the rise of national pride of place among the newly rising great powers, not just India? I continue to find mystifying the Western academic international law world's infatuation with the ideals of the dimishining importance of states and membership in states.  Particularly when that mostly seems to refer not to a universal aspiration, but only to the inability of the leading Western-states-in-decline to persuade themselves to exercise the coherence that makes states socially useful - and that largely through the cultural and class predilections of the political classes of those societies.  When are we going to see proper analytic attention to the Globalized New Class as a phenomenon?  In any event, the rising new powers understand that states are about coherence, and that the constant struggle of most states, most of the time, is to remain coherent and prevent "disaggregation" of the state into internal groups of power and "public choice" struggles for primacy and the resources of politics to economic ends. Disaggregation is attractive to many Western intellectuals, I'd suggest, however, because our species-being, so to speak, has gradually come to be purely contractual free agency.  We gave up on any kind of "fiduciary professional" model of the intellectual when we discovered that we could leverage our knowledge skills, at least until China and India caught up, across a needy global economy.  It required freeing ourselves from the strictures of local communities; but the opportunities for globally marketizing our professional expertise being very large, we have moved a long, long way from RH Tawney's post-war British model of the professional as community leader through expertise. That's not how we academics pronounce the disaggregation of the state.  Our favored trope is to declare disaggregation of the state as an enabler of individual freedom.  We mean by that, of course, particularly market freedom of the academic free agency market (best of both worlds: free agent competition as academics and tenure).  The coherence of states is seen by us as an inhibition to individual freedom in some cosmopolitan, fully-marketized, free-agent status for every individual in the world.  

Kevin’s Traveling Roadshow

I am heading to Europe on Wednesday for a couple of weeks.  I will be in Salzburg from November 13-19, participating in an amazing project on the intersection of international and Islamic law that is sponsored by the International Bar Association and the Salzburg Global Seminar.  (The definition of terror: my chapter for the resulting book, on sentencing and rights...