I would like to begin by echoing Ben Wittes thanks to Chris and his colleagues for creating this vehicle for informal but rigorous discussion of critical issues at the juncture of law and public policy. And of courseI want to express my appreciation at being invited to discuss the themes of my book only partially because, as Oscar Wilde once...
The World Bank last week released new figures - reflecting new and improved methodology - on the number of people in poverty around the world. The effect was to increase the number from roughly a billion people to something like 1.4 billion. The Economist explains: IN APRIL 2007 the World Bank announced that 986m people worldwide suffered from extreme poverty—the first...
I had resolved to say nothing about Sarah Palin -- really I had. But since I was sent home from school in Junior High for eliminating the "under God" part of the Pledge of Allegiance when it was my turn to read it over the school intercom, I just couldn't let this go. Palin was asked in 2006, during her...
This week we are pleased to host the first discussion in the Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris Book Club. Tom Farer, the Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, will join us to discuss his new book, Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy. In addition, Kristen Boon...
Turns out (along with who knows what else) that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, active enough to have attended its statewide convention in 1994. The party argues that Alaska's accession by referendum in 1958 violated international law, insofar as voters were not given the choice of independence in addition to the ballot options of statehood or continued status...
There’s so much domestic news these days it would’ve been easy to miss Eric Lichtblau’s story in yesterday’s New York Times about legislation introduced in Congress just before the August recess that would substantially define the scope of the United States’ war with Al Qaeda, et al. Indeed, it’s not clear why the Times itself finally just realized the significance...
... and hoping that the damage is minimal and that everyone is safe, including any OJ readers. Watching the television today caused me to recall a conference I attended a few years ago, a meeting of humanitarian disaster professionals who dealt with developing world disasters ranging from natural disasters to conflict relief. At one session, on natural disasters and, as...
My blogging has slowed down the past couple of weeks, because I've been traveling and finishing a book chapter that criticizes Moreno-Ocampo's approach to deciding which situations to investigate. (See my previous post.) But I would be remiss if I did not mention this interesting piece of news -- the Fifth Circuit has reversed the district court's dismissal of the...
The Supreme Court's Medellin decision has generated lots of academic attention (Julian and I, for example, are both participating in a joint ASIL-ABA Task Force on Treaties developed to address the future status of treaties in US law, which I'm sure will generate blog posts from one or both of us in the months ahead). This past week also saw the DC Circuit rely on Medellin explicitly...
The Guardian seems to think so: A coalition of human rights lawyers, academics and leading non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has begun openly to criticise the competence and conduct of the prosecutor of the international criminal court, the Argentinian Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Their concerns follow his announcement last month that it is to seek an arrest warrant for genocide against the Sudanese president, and...
I have blogged in the past about the growing phenomenon of 'libel tourism' and its chilling effects upon free expression, as well as some (really, considering the free expression issues under threat, quite modest) New York state and US federal legislative efforts to deal with it. It amounts to using English courts and their views on libel, together with the...
The blog Futurismic as an interesting post on "viral sovereignty." According to a recent Washington Post op-ed by Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett: This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations — even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat...
