In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

01 Mar

[caption id="attachment_11521" align="alignleft" width="120" caption=" "][/caption] [Anthony Clark Arend is a Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University]. When the Obama Administration came into office over a year ago, it was faced with a daunting task. The previous Administration had run rough-shot over international law dealing with the use of military force.  A man that would be Attorney General would call...

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01 Mar

[caption id="attachment_11512" align="alignleft" width="120" caption=" "][/caption] [Michael J. Glennon is Professor of Law at The Fletcher School at Tufts University] The article addresses a question that is particularly important for the United States. The Obama Administration has begun to express a renewed interest in the International Criminal Court (ICC), after almost a decade of distance between the Court and the United States....

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01 Mar

The wide-ranging book, which is edited by Carsten Stahn and Larissa van den Herik and published by Cambridge/TMC Asser, is well worth checking out.  Here is the table of contents: Part I. The Influence of Scholars and Practitioners on the Development and Conceptualization of International Criminal Law: 1. 'Satires of circumstance': some notes on war crimes trials and irony...

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28 Feb

At least according to Dominic Hughes, a BBC reporter who obviously can't be bothered to know what he's talking about: Perhaps not surprisingly Radovan Karadzic has been a reluctant participant in this trial. The former leader of the Bosnian Serbs has appeared just a few times, regularly boycotting the process. Apparently, "once" now qualifies as "regularly."  Good job, BBC! ADDENDUM: Hughes also claims that...

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28 Feb

My new Weekly Standard essay - although “polemic” is probably closer to it.  And thanks, Julian, for the plug below! Well, regular readers have been hearing about this piece for a while, and I have posted various arguments from it (concerning targeted killing and Predator drones and the CIA and armed conflict and self-defense, and my general concern that the...

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28 Feb

McGill University law students have started a new blog about international law, Legal Frontiers. Their official launch post states: The goal of Legal Frontiers is to create a scholarly, social network where students interested in International law can identify key issues and challenges; test new theories; and draw attention to important causes, cases or alternative points of view. Having been inspired...

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27 Feb

Both Humblelawstudent and Stuart Taylor have criticized my previous post.  Both misunderstand the federal torture statute and the concept of torture in important -- and unfortunately all too common -- ways, so it is worth explaining their errors in a separate post. Let's begin with HLS.  He claims that, contrary to my assertion, "the statute requires the interrogator to actually...

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27 Feb

The BBC reports: The European Court of Justice has ruled that Israeli goods made in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank cannot be considered Israeli. This means goods made by Israelis or Jews in the West Bank cannot benefit from a trade deal giving Israel preferential access to EU markets. At first glance, this seems like the correct result, especially given the...

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27 Feb

Our own Ken Anderson is one of the most knowledgeable and thoughtful legal scholars on the question of targeted killings by the United States. And he has noted here and the Volokh Conspiracy, he has developed a complex analysis of the U.S. policy toward targeted killings, which grounds such killings in the international law of self-defense rather than the law...

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27 Feb

David Luban and Stuart Taylor are having an interesting exchange at Balkinization over whether the CIA's use of waterboarding qualifies as torture under the federal torture statute, 18 USC 2340.  Luban accuses Taylor of embracing "the fundamental trick used by the torture lawyers: pretending that the legal definition of 'torture' is something technical rather than 'colloquial'," when...

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26 Feb

[caption id="attachment_10102" align="alignright" width="101" caption=" "][/caption] This coming Monday and Tuesday, Opinio Juris will be hosting its fourth online symposium in partnership with the Yale Journal of International Law. Each day, we will be hosting a series of posts revolving around Articles published in YJIL’s most recent Vol. 34-2, which is available for download here. On Monday, Michael J. Glennon of the Fletcher School...

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25 Feb

I've heard that the docket for the European Court of Human Rights is out of control, but a backlog of 120,000* cases is a little ridiculous. There is no doubt about the seriousness of the situation in Strasbourg. Jean-Paul Costa, president of the European Court of Human Rights, has referred to it as extremely disturbing. The parliamentary assembly of the Council of...

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