In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

08 Aug

[caption id="attachment_4216" align="alignleft" width="300" caption=""][/caption]Opinio Juris is pleased to announce a panel of international sports law experts as guest bloggers during the Beijing Olympics. Throughout the Olympic Games they will discuss international sports law and provide expert commentary on any Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) arbitrations that take place. Matt Mitten, Maidie Oliveau and Antonio Rigozzi are...

|
07 Aug

Salim Hamdan has been sentenced to 66 months in prison, far short of the 30 years-to-life sentence the prosecution requested.  Good news for Hamdan? Probably not, as Colonel Morris Davis -- the third chief prosecutor of the military commissions, who resigned because of political interference by the Pentagon -- pointed out in the comments to my ex post facto post: The...

|
07 Aug

The sole virtue of being the last among bloggers to weigh in on yesterday’s Hamdan verdict is having a chance to read what everyone else is saying. The New York Times, the ACLU, Human Rights First and others are pretty scathing in their criticism: don’t be fooled by the patina of fairness evinced by the split verdict, this system...

|
06 Aug

Durham University's International Boundaries Research Unit has made a map that illustrates the various disputes over the Arctic. The BBC reports: "Its primary purpose is to inform discussions and debates because, frankly, there has been a lot of rubbish about who can claim (sovereignty) over what," explained Martin Pratt, director of the university's International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU). "To be honest, most...

|
06 Aug

Well, the Hamdan verdict is in: guilty on five counts of material support to a terrorist organization, but significantly for cases to come - not guilty on the far broader charge of conspiracy. The Times’ story is here. Sentencing to follow this afternoon. This is hardly the end of the story. There will certainly be appeals. But...

|
06 Aug

  The State of Texas carried out its execution of Jose Ernesto Medellin late Tuesday night.  It did so following the Supreme Court's denial of a stay, 5-4.  The split is unsurprising, with the majority focused (accurately I suspect) on the fact that a legislative fix was unlikely, and reading DOJ's silence on the stay request as consistent with a larger...

|
05 Aug

Okay, so Medellin himself is going down. But as Julian highlights above, Texas has now undertaken to extend some sort of review and reconsideration to others covered by the Avena judgment. Why the quiet retreat? Here's some totally unsupported speculation: this is the result of a deal between Texas and Mexico. The GOM is sophisticated enough to understand...

|
05 Aug

That, in essence, is the surprising argument that the Coast Guard raised in a recent administrative law decision involving regulation of shipping traffic to protect an endangered species. In Defenders of Wildlife v. Gutierrez, the D.C. Circuit was presented with the question of whether Coast Guard action implementing "traffic separation schemes" constituted "final agency action" within the meaning of...

|
05 Aug

Almost buried amid the last-minute flurry of litigation over Medellin's pending execution tonight at 7 p.m. EDT, Texas has made a potentially important but ambiguous concession to the ICJ.  It has agreed to support federal habeas petitions in the future for Mexican citizens arguing that a failure of consular notification had caused prejudice to their criminal conviction and death sentence....

|