“Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?” is a fascinating book, and one of its great strengths is that it juxtaposes a number of different examples of how law and territory do not align, some of which have been largely forgotten. When most of us think about extraterritoriality, we think of issues like the extraterritorial application of antitrust law, the applicability...
A century ago the presidential race between Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan was consumed by the question of whether "the Constitution follows the flag." The United States had just acquired several overseas colonies in the wake of the Spanish-American War. The Democratic Party platform of 1900 declared that “We hold that the Constitution follows the flag, and...
Opinio Juris is pleased to be hosting over the next three days a discussion of Professor Kal Raustiala's new book, "Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law" (OUP 2009). Professor Raustiala is a professor of law at UCLA and also director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. He...
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is in trouble in the UN, according to a dismayed account in this week's Economist ("An idea whose time has come - and gone?" Economist, July 25, 2009, p 58). I'm dismayed, too. At the 2005 UN reform summit of the General Assembly, says the Economist the biggest-ever gathering of world leaders accepted the principle that they have...
Story here. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities entered into force in May 2008. It has some 60+ parties even though it's only been open for signature for a little over two years. Signing, of course, is the easy part. Question is what kind of push the Obama Administration will put into ratification and with what sort...
Recently, advocates for asylum seekers fleeing severe and state-sanctioned domestic violence in their home countries appeared to score a significant victory. In the case of a woman who requested asylum based on fears she would be murdered by her common-law husband in Mexico, the Department of Homeland Security filed a brief in April (unsealed recently as reported by the...
Rather than comment on the refreshingly tough realism or seriously imprudent bear-baiting of Vice-President Biden's recent remarks on Russia ("Russia will bend to the US"), or whether there is an important and dangerous gap between short-term and long-term in the collapse of an imperial nuclear power even if the long-run claim is true, etc., let me instead offer a background...
David Bernstein is back with yet another attack on Human Rights Watch. This time, Bernstein is up in arms that, in 2006, HRW retracted a claim that armed Palestinian groups had committed war crimes by using human shields -- an action that he believes proves, in light of HRW's refusal to apologize for its allegedly false criticisms of Israel, that...
Well, that's exactly what the Obama Administration did this past Wednesday. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed the 1976 ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) on behalf of the United States with the intention that her signature serve as the requisite act of accession, bringing the treaty immediately into force for the United States. Now, the treaty does not commit the United States...
The Rwandan government announced today that it will stop taking new gacaca cases as of July 31st and that it intends to wind down gacaca operations within five months. Gacaca is a traditional local justice procedure (gacaca roughly means “justice on the grass” in Kinyarwanda) that the government modified to process the staggering number of low-level genocide cases and...
My former student, Jeff Cook, who is currently serving as a postgraduate legal fellow with International Justice Mission in Phnom Penh, has a humorous post about litigation in Cambodia. Here is what Cook says is the common practice for witnesses swearing to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth": It didn't take long for me to...
For critics of universal jurisdiction, Spain's UJ statute has become the poster child for accusations of excess. How strange it seems that roughly ten years ago it was so widely celebrated as the provision that brought down General Augusto Pinochet. Spain's indicting the former Chilean dictator and Britain's detaining him on the attendant arrest warrant and extradition request...
