The great Irish intellectual, scholar, and diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien has died. Although for many OJ readers, he is remembered most as a diplomat - at the center of the United Nations and the Congo Crisis of 1961 - his greatest influence on me was through his massive study of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody. One passage that O'Brien cited...
No, I don't mean Obama's foreign policy. The Foreign Relations of the United States is the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity; and these days it's in trouble. The tip of the iceberg is the fracas described here and here between the Historian of the Department of State Marc Susser and the Advisory Committee on...
It turns out that all is not lost for the Lisbon Treaty (aka the EU Reform Treaty). It had all the markings of an unperfected treaty after Ireland gave it a "no" vote this past summer via a referendum. (Interestingly, Ireland was the only state to hold one, since negotiators had designed the Reform Treaty to avoid such reviews given what they did to the...
A lawyer and human-rights activist with whom I spent some time while I was in Sarajevo, Adnan Kadribasic, has given me permission to turn his comment to my Karadzic post into a post of its own. I think it's remarkable, and I want everyone to see it. Here it is, edited only for typos: Dear Kevin, I support all of your...
The BBC is reporting that President-elect Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo within the next two years. The report is based on this Time Magazine article declaring him (big surprise!) their "Person of the Year." I am not 100% sure Obama has really made this pledge, but it certainly can be read that way. In response to the question as...
The Ninth Circuit yesterday rendered its long-awaited decision in Sarei v. Rio Tinto. The case was argued before the Ninth Circuit en banc in October 2007, with the fourteen month deliberations suggesting that the court struggled mightily with its decision. The decision was fractured, but the essential holding by six of the eleven judges was that exhaustion of...
The UN Security Council has passed unanimously a US drafted resolution authorizing attacks upon pirates, whether by land or sea. It is one of those rare security issues in which the great powers, and many small ones, have been willing to come together, at least in granting authority. As the Washington Post reports: The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to authorize nations...
I have been resigned to a President Obama for at least a year or more, but the prospect of the real thing is still quite weird. I was, not surprisingly, for the other guy but I am mildly optimistic that a cautious President Obama will not usher in radical change in the areas of U.S. policy toward international law. But...
Just in time for Christmas too. Of course, it was not really him. Rather, it was Judge José Luis Jesus, the newly elected president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). President Jesus addressed the UN General Assembly on December 5, 2008, and met separately with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon a day earlier. Although these annual speeches traditionally provide...
At the risk of contributing further to Ken’s angst about the coming post-Guantanamo future, I thought OJ readers might be interested in this latest entry in the public what-to-do-next discussion. Fordham Law School’s Leitner Center for International Law and Justice has begun posting a series of white papers prepared by various groups of scholars with recommendations about international human rights...
I received in the mail a couple of days ago an author copy of the journal International History Review. I have a short piece in the December 2008 issue, a brief review of Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International. To be honest, I had not heard of the IHR before I accepted the assignment, but I was...
This past Friday I was privileged to host an intimate colloquium at Pepperdine’s Malibu Beach House that brought together a wonderful mix of torts scholars, international law scholars, and practitioners to address the nexus between torts and the Alien Tort Statute. It was an eclectic group, including renown torts experts such as Third Restatement Reporter Michael Green, Anthony Sebok,...
