In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

04 Aug

Greg Fox of Wayne State University Law School has posted a new article on SSRN that examines the proposed US/Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) from a unique angle. Discussions in U.S. academic journals and blogs have tended to focus on the constitutionality under U.S. law of the Administration pursuing the completion of a long-term security arrangement with Iraq under...

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04 Aug

Before heading to Bethlehem I spent an hour in the Old City of Jerusalem drinking Turkish coffee at the entrance to the Dome of the Rock as I watched thousands of devout Muslims pour in for afternoon prayers, sajjada in hand. I then exited the Muslim quarter through the Damascus Gate and caught sherut 124 to the security checkpoint....

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03 Aug

As I've mentioned before, I'm completing a short, popular, non-academic, policy book on US-UN relations.  The genesis of the book, however, was the run-up to the UN reform summit, the General Assembly summit (and accompanying final document) of September 2005. My editors have been beyond patient in waiting for me to finish this not-very-large project.  But I must say that the...

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02 Aug

Last week, reflecting on the effusive welcome he received in Germany, Obama said the following to a group of House Democrats: It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have just become a symbol of the possibility of America returning...

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02 Aug

On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris, I want to thank Benjamin Wittes  for joining us this week for a symposium his book Law and the Long War.  We also want to thank  Bobby Chesney,  Geoff Corn, Marty Lederman, Glenn Sulmasy, and Steve Vladeck for their guest-blogging with us. Their contributions were invaluable. We also want to thank everyone else from the Opinio Juris...

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01 Aug

Executive invocations of foreign affairs as the basis for dismissing otherwise valid litigation doesn't seem to work very well these days.  But there is one area where (thus far) courts have continued to give the U.S. executive essentially complete deference: determinations on immunity for heads of state.  And so it is today in the Federal District Court of D.C.'s decision...

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01 Aug

Well, we never got as far as interrogation or surveillance, but that's okay. This has been a truly exceptional exchange, a model of everything the debate over law and the war on terror too often is not: civil, serious, rigorous, and respectful of the profound difficulty of the issues at hand. Many thanks to all who participated in it and to...

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01 Aug

I want to close by thanking Ben for writing this terrific book, and our hosts here at OJ for sponsoring this discussion.  Before sigining off, however, I want to offer a few predictions and related observations about the road ahead. It appears quite possible that in the near future we will substantially reduce our reliance on military detention for terrorism suspects at...

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01 Aug

I must confess that I've been a bit cowed into silence by the heavyweight detention discussion between Deborah, Marty, and Ben. At the risk of wading in, though, I think Ben's point in his most recent post -- that detention should be based upon "dangerousness in the context of a showing of some significant relationship with groups against which Congress...

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01 Aug

A few final thoughts on detention and Al-Marwallah before we move on to interrogation--a subject on which I'm certain my arguments will provoke no disagreement. ;-) First, a concession: Marty is quite right that there is an ambiguity in the book concerning what the Al-Marwallah example stands for. I had not noticed this until his last post, and it warrants clarification....

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31 Jul

Well, Ben, much as I look forward to dining with you to discuss these issues further, I won't take that bet, because I tend to agree with you that al-Marwalah could be detained under the laws of war themselves, if the evidence could fairly be read, as you suggest, to indicate that he was engaged in combat against coalition forces...

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31 Jul

A quick note on the two latest case examples on the table in our ongoing detention debate. First, Mr. Al-Marwallah’s case is a prime example of why we shouldn’t make broad new detention policy based on the problems of Gitmo alone. Mr. Al-Marwallah may not be prosecutable for taking terrorist training pre-2001 since the criminal material support statute in...

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