See it here. As usual, it's full of great panels. Also, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Canadian Supreme Court and U.S. Department of State Legal Adviser Harold Koh will each give a keynote address. A list of program highlights is here. And, by the way, today is the last day for early-bird registration...
Dan Bodansky’s new book doesn’t just explain what international environmental law is. It explains why it exists, how it develops, and, very importantly, whether it makes a difference—a difference that you and I can experience in our everyday lives. What I like most about this book is that it gives the reader a feel for the subject (this is why...
For those of us living in the US, it is sometimes difficult to realize that interesting international legal events may also occur elsewhere; for instance, in the UK. Yet, times in the UK are very interesting indeed. This week alone the newspapers were filled with reports on the questioning of senior UK Foreign Office lawyers concerning the legality of the...
One of the most fascinating topics (for positivists like myself anyway) is how customary international law incorporates a consensual element via the idea of persistent objectors. Questions, of course, abound over why persistent objectors get an exemption from a customary rule, when subsequent objectors do not (unless other states acquiesce in the subsequent objector's departure from the rule, or take...
This morning I had the distinct displeasure of being woken up by a phone call coming in on my Finnish cell phone, around 6 a.m. The caller turned out to be a Helsinki-based energy company, which started to promise me all sorts of cheap energy until I pointed out that I was currently residing in New York, that it was...
There are few international lawyers in the world who know more about climate change than Dan Bodansky. More generally, Dan is also an expert on international environmental law (IEL), and in this book he has distilled years of study and observation into a very readable yet sophisticated treatment of the subject. A successful overview and analysis of IEL is very...
I want to thank Dan for writing such a comprehensive book about the conceptual and applied elements in international environmental law (IEL). To a non-lawyer, it reads like a state of the art report on IEL. International environmental law is particularly striking to me, especially when compared to other substantive areas of international law, in the number of actual texts...
How and why do international environmental norms arise? In what ways do they affect behavior? Do they change what states and individuals actually do, and, if so, why? How effective are they in solving international environmental problems? These are some of the questions I examine in my new book, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law. My decision to write the book...
Opinio Juris is pleased to be hosting this week a discussion of Professor Dan Bodansky's new book, "The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law" (Harvard Univ. Press, 2010). Dan is well known to our readers as a frequent guest blogger and commentator on international environmental law, a field in which he is one of the world's leading scholars. The...
If you haven't seen this already, you should. The eight-minute video shows the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent, 24-year-old Kseniya Simonova, dramatizing the effect of Operation Barbarossa on the Ukraine through a series of drawings on an illuminated sand table. It is absolutely mesmerizing -- beautiful, disturbing, moving. As you will see, many members of the audience...
President Obama’s decision not to seek additional legislative authority for detentions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—combined with Congress’s lack of interest in the task—means that, for good or for ill, judges through their exercise of habeas jurisdiction are writing the substantive and procedural rules governing military detention of terrorist suspects. Our purpose in this report is to describe in detail and analyze the courts’ work to date—and thus map the contours of the nascent law of military detention that is emerging from it.
Over the last few days I learned a valuable lesson: irony and satire do not work. I thought my contribution on soft statehood was written with my tongue so far in my cheek that it risked coming out of my ear; I thought I had piled on the layers of irony so richly that had my contribution been a pastry,...
