A proposition at the center of much international development work in the past decade or more has been the importance of institutions - whether one talks about "good governance" or the "rule of law" or other terms referring to institutions of governance in a society that permit stability across time. The claim has always seemed to engage the happy coincidence...
Yes, after nearly nine years of detention in Guantanamo, Noor Uthan Muhammed has pleaded guilty to two non-existent war crimes. As the ACLU notes in its post on the plea, although the court reporter faithfully translated each time he said "yes" to whether he understood what he was doing, the reporter did not translate the only full sentence Muhammed uttered:...
According to the Jerusalem Post, five purchasers of Jimmy Carter's new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid have filed a $5 million lawsuit in federal court in New York against Carter and Simon & Schuster, the book's publisher. The lawsuit alleges that the book violates New York consumer-protection laws by claiming to be a work of non-fiction (my emphasis): The five...
Even when Moreno-Ocampo wins, he loses. Pre-Trial Chamber II recently rejected a request by Mohammed Hussein Ali, one of the six Kenyans for whom the OTP has sought summonses, to submit "observations" on the investigation That was an easy call; nothing in the Rome Statute permits a suspect to participate in the investigative process so early. The Pre-Trial Chamber nevertheless...
As I discussed yesterday, an Ecuador Court has issued an $8.6 billion judgment against Chevron. I just got off a press conference call with plaintiff's chief lawyer in Ecuador, Pablo Fajardo. He stated that the plaintiffs will seek enforcement of the Lago Agrio judgment throughout the world as soon as the Ecuador appeals process is complete. (At...
Pennumbra, the on-line companion to the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, is hosting the debate. John's opening statement and my reply -- which is something of a misnomer, because the reply doesn't directly address John's arguments -- are currently available. Both focus on Judge Bates' opinion dismissing the ACLU/CCR lawsuit; I argue that, contrary to the Judge's claim, his opinion...
Today an Ecuador court fined Chevron $8.6 billion for environmental damage. According to the Wall Street Journal, $5.4 billion of that is to restore polluted soil, $1.4 billion to create a health system for the community, $800 million to treat individuals injured by the pollution, $600 million to restore polluted waters, $200 million to restore native species, $150 million...
For the next five months, I will be a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Law at East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai. For a variety of reasons related to my status as a Fulbright Grantee as well as being a blogger living within the range of Chinese internet censors, I will take a sabbatical from blogging here...
It's been a while since I checked in on the WikiLeaks kerfuffle, so now that the HILJ symposium is over -- and I thought it was great -- I wanted to flag this recent article in the Wall Street Journal, which reports that the government has found no evidence that WikiLeaks or Julian Assange solicited or conspired with Bradley Manning...
