One of my favorite issues of the New York Times Magazine is its "year in ideas" issue, which comes annually in December. Because OJ is a repository of things related to battlefield robotics and law and ethics, I wanted to flag for your attention the item by Dara Kerr, "Guilty Robots." [I]magine robots that obey injunctions like Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative...
President Obama's Nobel Prize speech yesterday made reference to the moral authority, under the ethics of the just war, for armed humanitarian intervention in some situations. It is a topic that has been debated and discussed as a matter of international law for, well, a long time, but which gained particular urgency following on Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo in the...
[As noted earlier, Professor Dan Bodansky is continuing his dispatches on the climate change talks. He is in Copenhagen this week and next, and sends us this initial letter. OJ will be providing additional commentary on the climate change talks -- from the conference, and from other academic commentators -- over the next week. Dan's letter is being cross-posted at...
Obama’s Nobel Lecture is a great speech. He spoke strongly in favor of international institutions and even more so international law. The great surprise of the speech is its unstinting support for just war theory. There is no doubt that Obama’s Nobel Lecture is the most hawkish one in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize. ...
Der Spiegel has an excellent story on the possibility that a Eurozone country might default on its sovereign debt, with economic, political, and legal consequences that could be anything from serious to dire. The country is Greece: Greece has already accumulated a mountain of debt that will be difficult if not impossible to pay off. The government has borrowed more than...
The Guardian has a leaked copy of what it's calling "the Danish text" (see it here). Apparently, this draft was developed by the Danes along with other developed countries including the United States and the United Kingdom in the hope that it might become the basis for whatever instrument emerges from Copenhagen. As widely expected, the instrument is framed as a "political agreement"...
I'm not usually in the habit of posting on job openings, but I thought this one might warrant wider exposure and expect it will be of interest to some of our more experienced readers (particularly those who've always dreamed of living in Vienna). The IAEA is looking for a new Director for its Office of Legal Affairs. Here's how the IAEA...
Dan Drezner's take at Foreign Policy on the latest Pew Research Poll on U.S. foreign policy attitudes uses a more provocative term than "uninformed," but the point is the same. Can the public be "realist" in its attitudes to the world when those attitudes are based on factual assumptions that don't exactly align with reality? Lots of interesting comments...
B. Don Taylor, a former legal officer at the ICTY and a good friend, has argued in the comments to a recent post that although Dr. Karadzic's criticisms of the procedure the Registry used to appoint Harvey may well have merit, Dr. Karadzic's request for certification to appeal the Rule 44 issue did not adequately raise the issue. I disagree...
[This is a guest post by Professor Greg Gordon of the University of North Dakota. Professor Gordon is the Director of the UND Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies, an expert on international criminal law and a past guest blogger at Opinio Juris.] Earlier this week, Spanish National Court Judge Balthazar Garzon initiated money laundering proceedings against the widow...
I will write on this at greater length in a couple of days after a few of the key parties have made their arguments. For now, I just want to note that the oral proceeding transcripts will be available here. In the Tuesday morning session (which is all that has been posted at the time of this writing), Serbia set out...
With the kerfuffle over the White House gate-crashing gaining all the attention, another flap over gate crashing is flying below the radar. It appears that Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame returned from the dead to meet with Ali Treki, President of the United Nations General Assembly. As reported here: A spokeswoman for Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general,...
