Sarfaty’s reply addresses a fundamental problem with conflating norms with binding legal rights. In my article, I argue that the classification of a potential human right—like participatory development—may be seen as operating on a continuum. On one end of the continuum exists a norm. On the other end exists a rule of customary international law. As a norm...
[Galit A. Sarfaty is a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Program on the Legal Profession, and a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago] I would like to thank Opinio Juris and Martin Totaro for the opportunity to comment on this engaging article. The piece is an excellent contribution to existing literature on norm development and international human...
[Martin Totaro is an associate at Baker Botts in Washington, D.C. These views are his alone. Please find his SSRN author page here.] Thanks to Opinio Juris for providing an outlet for VJIL authors to express their ideas to a wide audience, and thanks to VJIL for including me as one of those authors. Galit Sarfaty has graciously agreed to respond....
In his generous response to my article, Sam Erman rightly points to the importance of understanding the intersection between the Gonzales case and other struggles over citizenship that were unfolding even as Isabel González tried to make her way to New York City from her native Puerto Rico. Ngai’s book Impossible Subjects is a good place to start in order...
[Sam Erman is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Culture and recent J.D. recipient at the University of Michigan] The scholarly attention that Burnett devotes to Gonzales v. Williams (1904) is long overdue. The case is crucial to understanding the relationship between U.S. imperialism, U.S. citizenship, and the U.S. constitutional order in the early twentieth century. She shows us how in it...
Professor Ngai goes to the heart of the matter when she alludes to a literature on colonialism that takes issue with an essentializing nationalism. In my work on Degetau and on other figures of the intellectual elite of the American imperial periphery, I seek to offer an alternative to the nationalist perspective that has long dominated post-colonial historiography, in which...
[Professor Mae Ngai is Lung Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, Columbia University] I especially appreciate Christina Burnett’s examination of Federico Degetau’s “legal cosmopolitanism” in Gonzales v. Williams. Burnett shows that intellectuals in the colonial periphery made a unique contribution to the legal discourse on empire and citizenship. Degetau’s critique, that the American wish to “nationalize” Puerto Ricans...
[Professor Christina Duffy Burnett is Associate Professor of Law, Columbia University] My article in the latest issue of the Virginia Journal of International Law forms part of a larger project in which my goal is to tell a different kind of constitutional history of empire. Rather than focus on the question that has long occupied constitutional historians of U.S. imperialism—whether the...
At most of the museums here in Rome, children get reduced-price or free admission only if they are EU citizens. For us weakened-dollar Americans, that makes a nontrivial difference. We are going to the Villa Borghese later today. At 13€ per person, with two kids, that will be 52 Euros – more than 75 bucks. A...
The persecution continues:Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Monday the government would press ahead with plans to fingerprint ethnic Roma, including children - a move branded as discriminatory by European Union officials. Frattini - the EU's top justice official before he joined Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's cabinet - was commenting on remarks made Sunday by Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, who...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has rejected an appeal by Maher Arar, a Canadian national who is suing various U.S. government officials for injuries suffered during his "extraordinary rendition" shortly after 9/11 (h/t to Vince Vitowsky). The court, via Judge Jose Cabranes, held that Arar had failed to state a claim under the Torture Victim...
The Virginia Journal of International Law will continue its partnership with Opinio Juris this week with an online symposium featuring three articles recently published in VJIL Vol. 48-4, available here. Our discussion on Tuesday will focus on the constitutional history of American empire at the turn of the twentieth century. In her article, “They say I am not an American…”: The...
