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...
Is that even possible these days? It seems not, but the Federalist Society is sure doing a nice job in lining up Andrew McCarthy, Scott Horton, Douglas Kmiec, David Luban, Bart DePalma and Steve Vladeck to debate the recent release of the CIA interrogation memos and their content. No one has yet denounced the other in ad hominem attacks and there...
No sooner had I read Peter's thought-provoking post about transparency in arbitration than I received a link to a complete webcast of this month's arbitration before the Permanent Court of Arbitration between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement/Army over the Abyei region. This appears to be the first videotape/webcast of an arbitration between a state and...
Maybe. In any event, Harold Koh's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be webcast live starting around 2:15 (thanks to Mark Shulman for the tip). I predict a very boring hearing where nothing of substance will be asked, and nothing of substance will be offered as an answer either. This should work to Koh's benefit, of course. Boring...
