I am fundamentally in agreement with the Bradley-Goldsmith view that Julian and Kevin discuss in the two previous posts. However, I want to post up a related question. It is not so much about the ATS itself or its implications for US law or its politics. It is, rather, about the substance of the legal positions produced in ATS cases...
Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith have a new op-ed taking aim at the latest decision in the ongoing Alien Tort Statute case involving U.S. corporations who did business during South Africa apartheid era. In fact, they take issue with the whole wave of ATS litigation attempting to hold corporations liable under aiding and abetting liability, using the South Africa case...
In today's Washington Post, Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith have an editorial attacking the recent refusal of a federal judge to grant a motion to dismiss in Khulumani v. Barclays National Bank Ltd, the ATS lawsuit brought by victims of apartheid against 23 corporations who did business with the South African government during the apartheid era. It's a remarkably unpersuasive...
More evidence that the CIA interrogators did not rely in good faith on the OLC memos: Bradbury's 30 May 2005 memo acknowledges (p. 37) that the CIA Inspector General's report found that the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah 83 times in August 2002. That regime far surpasses the CIA's own internal guidelines...
As we all know, the ICC does not have jurisdiction over the acts of torture committed by the CIA at Guantanamo Bay -- neither the US nor Cuba is a member of the Court. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that it would be far easier to prosecute the CIA interrogators at the ICC than in the US, because there is...
I'm not particularly surprised, but I'm still disappointed. Israel's ostensible justification is that the UNHRC resolution that created the fact-finding mission is biased, because it only asked Goldstone to investigate Israeli war crimes. That was a ridiculous move on the UNHRC's part, to be sure -- but one of the very first things Goldstone did was to make...
I am grateful to Mr. Li and Professor Wang for their thoughtful comments and am flattered by their praise. The very fact that a lawyer and a law professor speak of their criminal justice system with such insight and candor highlights one of the most laudatory aspects of Taiwan’s legal reform project: A transparent, open debate over the best path...
[Jaw-perng Wang is Professor of Law at National Taiwan University] I am very impressed that a foreign scholar, especially a common-law trained one, could have a precise picture of Taiwan’s criminal procedure and its history and recent reforms. Without spending tremendous time and effort, an article that accurately and meticulously reports Taiwan’s criminal procedure, like this one, could not possibly be...
[Nigel Li is a prominent lawyer and legal scholar in Taiwan] Professor Lewis' article comes timely as a 10-year review of the half-baked criminal procedure reforms in Taiwan, particularly in a vacuum of rigorous academic attention to an ambitious attempt to transplant the common-law adversarial system to a soil of civil-law inquisitorial adjudication by a rising young democracy seeking a new...
[Margaret K. Lewis is a Senior Research Fellow at NYU Law School's U.S.-Asia Law Institute.] Thank you to the editors of the Virginia Journal of International Law and to Opinio Juris for providing this forum. My article grew out of work on legal reforms in Mainland China, which led to a cross-Strait project. As I learned more about Taiwan’s criminal justice...
I argued below that "good faith reliance" on OLC opinions does not justify promising CIA interrogators that they will not be prosecuted for their criminal acts. With regard to waterboarding, it is important to note that it seems clear some of the interrogators cannot even argue good faith reliance. Consider the following footnote from Bradbury's May 10, 2005, memo, discussing...
Having criticized Obama somewhat regularly as of late, it's important to give him partial credit where partial credit is due -- he has released the four OLC torture memos with a minimum of redaction. You can find the memos here. That could not have been an easy decision, given the CIA's opposition to having its systematic criminality (further) exposed. Nevertheless, Obama...
