In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

10 Nov

[caption id="attachment_10102" align="alignright" width="101" caption=" "][/caption] The Yale Journal of International Law (YJIL) has announced the launch of its new website, http://www.yjil.org, featuring unique online content for the first time in its thirty-five year history. YJIL Online provides authors a forum for short analytical essays relevant to the furtherance of both scholarship and practice. The first issue includes a co-authored piece...

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09 Nov

I'm sorry I wasn't and I don't quite know what happened.  I knew that big things were happening, but unlike Peggy's experience, it all seemed very gradual to me and finally anti-climactic.  It seemed like something that was gradually sliding into place. I credit that to two things.  One was that I was working in a Manhattan law firm, and completely...

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09 Nov

As I reported here, the two cases of Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida present the best opportunity for constitutional comparativism since Roper v. Simmons. We apparently are an international outlier and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, with 190 parties, categorically prohibits JLWOP for everyone under the age of eighteen. But from reading the transcripts...

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09 Nov

The 6th Committee of the GA recently finished its first reading of the 66 draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (“RIO”). The draft articles create rules on when international organizations can be held responsible for internationally wrongful acts under international law. In other words, when can international organizations ("IOs") sue or be sued?...

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09 Nov

Tommy Crocker, who teaches constitutional law and criminal procedure at the University of South Carolina School of Law, will be guest-blogging with us for the next two weeks.  Tommy writes on a variety of issues, including torture and the First Amendment.  His work has appeared the UCLA Law Review, the Texas Law Review, Fordham Law Review, and the peer-reviewed Law...

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09 Nov

Following up on Ken's post (whose views I totally endorse, by the way), I wanted to flag one UN budgetary issue of particular interest to our readers. As the NYT article details, UN budget negotiators will battle over whether each of the ICJ's 15 judges should have a law clerk. They currently share nine.  Former ICJ President Roslyn Higgins made an...

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08 Nov

The New York Times reports on budget season at the UN and various battles hotting up.  It's a good piece by Neil MacFarquhar, dated November 7, 2009.  As the article says, that fact that it costs the United Nations an average of $2,473 per page to create every single document in its six official languages, while outside contractors complete the same...

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08 Nov

Both Martin Holterman and Sasha Greenawalt have questioned my repeated -- and quite deliberate -- insistence that "no competent barrister will accept appointment as stand-by counsel under these circumstances," and that any barrister who does accept the appointment will thus "be interested in one thing and one thing only: the free publicity that comes with it."  Martin's comment is the...

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07 Nov

I'm slightly embarrassed to interrupt the flow of the serious academic discussion underway, but I found this a fascinating site.  MarineTraffic.com, with a live GoogleEarth map of marine shipping worldwide.  This distracted me for half an hour when I was supposed to be re-writing a chapter called ...

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06 Nov

I would like to thank Kathy Stone for commenting on my Article and agreeing to participate in this symposium. She has sharply characterized the main arguments of my paper and made two very helpful criticisms. Both of these are great prods for future work. Let me respond to each of these suggestions in turn. Stone is right that I devoted most...

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06 Nov

[Daniel Bodansky, University of Georgia School of Law and OJ guest blogger, sends this second dispatch on the state of the Climate Change talks leading up to the Copenhagen Conference. Professor Bodansky will also be blogging from Copenhagen here at Opinio Juris in December.] This week, the chair of the negotiations and the executive secretary of the UN climate change...

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