On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris I would like to thank Mary Ellen O’Connell having joined us this week in our second Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris book symposium for a discussion of her new book, The Power and Purpose of International Law. We would also like to thank Beth Simmons for joining us as a guest commentor. Thanks also to everyone who posted comments...
Anyone who still doubts that the ICC's pursuit of Bashir is unnerving the Sudanese government should take a gander at this article: An interview with published by Sudan official news agency (SUNA) with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband yesterday is fabricated, according to a statement by the British embassy in Khartoum. “The statements that SUNA news agency attributed to the Foreign Secretary...
My friend and colleague Daniel Bradlow, professor of law and director of the international legal studies program at Washington College of Law, as well as SARCHI professor of development law and African economic relations at the University of Pretoria, has a new short opinion essay on how Africa should respond to the global financial crisis and the deliberations of the...
The power of international law comes from our belief in it and the purposes it serves: the promotion of peace, human rights, prosperity and the natural environment. Beth Simmons in her thoughtful and well-written post suggests that we need empirical evidence of this belief. There is, however, plenty of evidence—indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, if not categorized and precisely quantified. We...
As was widely reported, the United States and Iraqi negotiators (finally!) concluded negotiations last week by signing the text of a U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). Both sides now need to go through their respective domestic approval processes before exchanging the necessary notifications to bring the SOFA into force. In Iraq, that process includes parliamentary approval, which is not a slam dunk if...
What will it take to engage in a constructive debate about the power and limits of international law in international affairs? One answer is a book like Mary Ellen O’Connell’s, which makes a compelling case that not only scholars but laypersons and decision makers should think deeply before they disparage the international legal system in its entirety. Mary Ellen’s book...
[caption id="attachment_5673" align="alignright" width="176" caption="Prof. Joel Trachtman"][/caption] Back in 2005 when Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner published their book, The Limits of International Law, they garnered a lot of attention for promoting the application of rational choice theory to international law (IL), and, equally importantly, suggesting that this method showed IL to have much less influence than conventional wisdom suggested. And the...
One of the most interesting jurisprudential aspects of The Power and Purpose of International Law is its explicit use of Hans Kelsen. I am among those Americans for whom Kelsen is a mostly forgotten figure in jurisprudence - and I realized reading this book that, while I have probably read much more than most American legal scholars of his jurisprudential...
Within the context of our roles as part of a research group at Princeton’s Center for Theological Inquiry, Mary Ellen and I have had many wonderful conversations about natural law as a source for international law. My sense is we both share the view that natural law could be such a source, and we have discussed various instances...
The Asian Society of International Law announces the "Second Biennial General Conference of the Asian Society of International Law," at the University of Tokyo, August 1-2, 2009, which takes up the important issue of Asia’s relationship with the international legal order under the main theme of “International Law in a Multi-polar and Multi-civilizational World – Asian Perspectives, Challenges and Contributions.” The...
Despite the title of his post, I do not read Chris Borgen as a natural law skeptic! He accepts the existence of norms and principles that must be explained by theories other than positivism. He is just skeptical about the standard approach to explaining the source of natural law, namely, the use of the concept of the common...
Salon.com has an article today about the Obama administration and torture that floats the horrifying possibility -- all too real, I'm sure -- that Bush will issue a blanket pardon for "anyone who participated in, had knowledge of, or received information about Bush's interrogation program during the so-called war on terror." I'm not going to waste precious pixels responding to...
