It has gone all but unnoticed in the U.S. but Russia has declared victory in its fight against Chechen rebels. Chechnya had become a byword for a place of chaos and random violence perpetrated by all sides, especially since the first Chechen War of 1994-1996. But a recent report by the Times of London concerning Russian black operations in the...
William Ranney Levi's paper on interrogation techniques, Interrogation's Law, is forthcoming in Yale Law Journal, but is up at SSRN. Here is the abstract: Conventional wisdom states that recent U.S. authorization of coercive interrogation techniques, and the legal decisions that sanctioned them, constitute a dramatic break with the past. This is false. U.S. interrogation policy well prior to 9/11 has allowed...
University of Iowa law professor Mark Osiel - an old friend of mine and someone well known to many of us, particularly for his books and writing on mass atrocities - has a new book out, The End of Reciprocity: Terror, Torture, and the Law of War (Cambridge 2009). I've read it at pretty high speed - looking for some...
Congratulations to Ed Swaine and Sean Murphy for yesterday's Potomac Roundtable on foreign relations law at GW. It was a terrific meeting, with excellent papers from Kristina Daugirdas, Louis Fisher, and Ed Swaine - topics ranging from FSIA to war powers to Youngstown. I learned a lot - Duncan was also in attendance from Philly - and it was great...
I imagine many readers have by now seen this story in the New York Times (and Julian beats me to it!) reporting that the Obama administration appears ready to return to military commissions for trying at least some Guantamo detainees: Officials who work on the Guantánamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying...
So I'm not exactly surprised that Obama is planning to revive the use of military commissions to try terror suspects, (according to the NYT). The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself. No doubt there will be some amendment to the Bush commissions,...
The conventional wisdom is probably correct here, that David Souter's retirement won't make much of a difference to the Court's overall balance. But no two Justices are alike. There will be inevitable differences in style and approach, and on the less prominent questions, the ones mostly off the radar screen, that can lead to different votes. I don't know much...
[ Laura Dickinson is Foundation Professor of Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.] It seems that in some quarters, support for international law (combined with a little bit of humor) is enough to get one labeled “so out there” to be unqualified for government service. A few commentators on the right have recently decided to attack international...
For a while there, it looked as if there might be a real fight over Harold Koh's nomination as State Department Legal Adviser. The Republicans have been casting about for a nomination that they could defeat on some issue of principle (that is, over something not involving a nominee's tax returns), along the lines of Lani Guinier's failed nomination...
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a provocative essay by Brian Weeden critiquing the idea that the U.S. should sign on to a treaty banning the weaponization of space. The author's point is not so much that he thinks there should be unregulated military use of space, but rather whether a treaty is the best way to go about...
In case you haven't seen them already, I wanted to point out that Beth Van Schaack and Hari Osofsky have a couple of posts at IntLawGrrls on yesterday's Koh confirmation hearing....
The Eleventh Circuit earlier this month ruled that Manuel Noriega could be extradited to France following the completion of his sentence in Florida. In Noriega v. Pastrana, Noriega argued that under the Third Geneva Convention he was entitled to automatic and immediate repatriation to Panama as soon as his criminal sentence was complete. However, Section 5 of the...
