Secretary Clinton yesterday released the much-awaited first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. It's an important document, and if implemented (a big if, given the shift in Congress and threats to cut State's funding) it would have important consequences on the ground. The central theme of "civilian power" has a nice ring to it in the context of situating diplomacy, a...
Video here. (Downfall producers seem to have unblocked these parodies, which had been taken down some time ago for copyright reasons. Lawprofs might be entertained by this one, clearly composed by someone in our ranks -- the mindset of someone who's taught for a while is perfectly satirized in a way that no outsider could, ever.)...
Having received a number of emails complaining about how I counted the size of various faculties, I have decided to remove both posts. As I made clear in the original post, my count was not designed to be scientific and excluded -- rightly or wrongly -- a number of categories of scholars that some might believe should have been included. ...
I always wish I had more opportunities to blog about international environmental law (IEL), especially in light of recent developments (and thanks to Dan Bodansky for keeping our readers' abreast of all the happenings in Cancun). For those of you who have a similar affinity for IEL, check out the new(ish) blog from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). It's...
The Ninth Circuit this week ruled that there was no federal policy with respect to the Armenian Genocide, thereby allowing insurance claims brought by Armenian nationals under a California statute to go forward. In Movsesian v. Victoria Versicherung AG, the Ninth Circuit distinguished Garamendi, concluding that there was no federal policy against recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Indeed, "[c]onsidering...
David Glazier is a Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He has written, under the same title as this post, a paper critiquing U.S. military commissions which you can download from SSRN here. As the Senate considers an outright ban on the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo to the United States this week, it seems obvious that...
Courtesy of Ben Wittes at Lawfare, responding to a question about whether he believes that, if America should be permitted to prosecute a non-American like Assange for disclosing American secrets, countries like France, China, or Iran should be able to prosecute Americans for disclosing their secrets (my emphasis): This, in turn, leads ineluctibly to Tom’s reciprocity point: If Congress can make...
Buried in a post from Ben Wittes at Lawfare is a suggestion (in response to HRW's Tom Malinowski) that the Espionage Act shouldn't apply outside US territory to non-citizens: [T]his statute has a nuance that makes one pause before treating it as just another extraterritorial application of American law. That nuance is that the entire moral force of a...
"The majority of the Supreme Court said that although they would not stop publication in advance, the question of whether there could be prosecution afterwards was a completely different thing." --former Attorney General Michael Mukasey on the Pentagon Papers Mukasey is right. It seems that in the attempts to compare this case to the Pentagon Papers, the essential distinction between the...
A coalition of 26 of Australia's most prominent journalists -- essentially, the editors of every major newspaper (with the exception of the right-wing The Australian) and the news directors of all the major networks -- have written a remarkable open letter to Julia Gillard criticizing the U.S. (and Australian) government's attacks on WikiLeaks and threats to prosecute Assange. Here is...
Oh, how much difference a year -- and lower expectations -- make! The BBC report on the Cancun meeting declared that "if Copenhagen was the Great Dane that whimpered, Cancun has been the Chihuahua that roared." Never mind that the Great Dane's whimper was about the same decibel level as the Chihuahua's roar. Last year, expectations were sky high for a new legal...
I don't quite mean that, of course. The total number of "international" law faculty depends on so many different things at any given law school. What I do mean is to follow on Kevin's post and ask, supposing you are trying to rationally plan out an international law faculty and curriculum, or more practically gradually shape into the future according...
