In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

10 Feb

I'm not at all surprised by this. Barack Obama's justice department has repeated a Bush administration policy of citing "state secrets" to prevent the release of evidence concerning extraordinary renditions. The decision, revealed at a hearing in a San Francisco appeals court, came days after the British high court ruled that evidence of renditions and torture must remain secret so as not to endanger the intelligence...

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09 Feb

[Opinio Juris is pleased to present this essay by Professor Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern Law School on the relationship between international law and anti-piracy efforts.  Please be sure to click "continue reading" to read the whole essay.] The successful ransom by Somali pirates of a Ukrainian freighter laden with arms and armor is indicative of the broader failure of the...

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09 Feb

John Louth at OUP has kindly alerted me to the existence of a new blog that will no doubt be of interest to our readers: the International Criminal Law Bureau. Members include well-known practitioners and scholars, including Steven Kay, QC, and Guénaël Mettraux (of whom I'm a big fan). The blog is part of a larger project by the same name. ...

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09 Feb

I have been meaning to do a post about the Supreme Court's first antidumping decision in decades, but frankly the case is a yawner. The question in United States v. Eurodif is whether the importation of low enriched uranium (LEU) is a good or a service. If it is the latter, then it cannot be subject to antidumping...

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06 Feb

The Wall Street Journal has an article today, February 6, 2009, front page, on the rush by states to enact new trade barriers in all sorts of ways.  The WTO is expressing great concern, indeed saying that it is unable even to keep up with tracking the barriers being erected. The landscape is moving so fast that officials at the WTO,...

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05 Feb

Well, the rumors have now officially made it to the blogosphere. Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh is (at the very least) on someone's short list to take over from John Bellinger as the next Legal Adviser at the Department of State. See it here in TNR, which got it from no less a source than the Yale Daily News....

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05 Feb

Sometimes reporters and their editors get caught up in a narrative, and forget to check facts.  In the case of Obama and Bush, every Obama pronouncement is presumed to represent a reversal of Bush policy. But this is simply not true (see, e.g., the predictable and apparently uncontroversial Obama retention of Bush policies on  "extraordinary rendition" and airstrikes in Pakistan).   And so it...

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05 Feb

I found this article in the Yale Alumni Magazine about Tony Blair's new Faith Foundation absolutely fascinating. Tony Blair is now teaching a course at Yale with the eminent theologian Miroslav Volf on the subject of "Faith and Globalization." According to the article, Blair is trying to use this foundation to encourage interfaith tolerance and dialogue. Given...

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05 Feb

Chris mentioned earlier the NPR interview with Brookings Institution scholar PW Singer on his new book, Wired for War.  I am naturally reading the book as we speak, but for those wanting a useful, clear, short take from Singer himself, check out the Winter 2009 issue of the Wilson Quarterly, and Singer's cover article, "Robots at War: The New Battlefield."...

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04 Feb

The ICJ has issued a judgment in the case Maritime Delimitation in the Black Sea (Romania v. Ukraine). At first glance the issue may seem relatively dry: whether Serpents' Island in the Black Sea is an inhabited island or just a rocky outcropping. But the answer to this question affects maritime delimitation lines, which in turn resolves which country has the right to...

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04 Feb

I rarely like – if that is even the right word – movies about the Holocaust.  Such movies almost invariably invite us to identify with a small number of Jews imprisoned in the concentration camps, turning the millions of others (unintentionally, to be sure) into a nameless, faceless backdrop of suffering that makes the fate of “our” Jews all the...

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04 Feb

The Second Circuit last week rendered another important ATS decision addressing some of the most troublesome issues relating to human rights litigation against corporate defendants. In the case of Abdullahi v. Pfizer, the Second Circuit was faced with the question of whether involuntary medical testing on humans violates international law. Perhaps the most significant part of the decision was the...

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