Recent Posts

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...

Annual Duke-Harvard Foreign Relations Law Workshop

Duke Law is hosting the annual Duke-Harvard Foreign Relations Law Workshop tomorrow, and, as usual offers a stellar line-up.  This year's topic is The Political Economy of Foreign Relations Law.  For those interested in knowing more, here's the line-up. Session 1: War Powers Peter D. Feaver, Seven Provocations on Domestic Politics of Foreign Relations William G. Howell, Wartime Presidents Douglas L. Kriner, More than...

Suing to Block Oklahoma’s Constitutional Amendment

A few days ago, Roger (and others) discussed the possibility of legal challenges to Oklahoma's constitutional amendment prohibiting its judges from considering international and Sharia law.  I have my own questions about the amendment under the Supremacy Clause beyond the more obvious arguments that Oklahoma Courts must apply treaties that fall within Article VI's ambit (putting aside for now debates over whether non-self-execution limits...

International Law Banned in Oklahoma State Courts

Yesterday voters in Oklahoma voted overwhelmingly (70% in favor to 30% against) to ban the use of international law and Sharia law in state courts. It appears that the referendum will be headed to the courts for review, for as my colleague Michael Helfand has noted, the ban on Sharia law may well be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The...

The U.S. Midterm Elections and International Law

What does the change of power in the U.S. Congress (at least in the House) mean for U.S. attitudes toward international law and foreign policy?  Not much, I think, since I think foreign policy is one of the few areas where we can imagine the new more conservative Republicans and President Obama working together better than he did with progressive...