While there's much, much more to be said on the Supreme Court's blockbuster decision today in Boumediene, the not-quite-companion case involving U.S. citizens held by the Americans in Iraq also came down today—and the news there is hardly pro-detainee. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that while the U.S. federal courts have jurisdiction to hear the habeas petitions of...
Roger points to the importance of territory in marking the boundaries of citizenship. The other key element in constitutional cartography has been citizenship status, at least since Reid v. Covert. When it comes to enjoying the protection of the Constitution abroad, as a general matter citizens get it, noncitizens don’t. Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Boumediene appears to slice at that in...
First, my thanks again to Roger, Peggy, and the rest of the OJ crew for the opportunity to share some preliminary thoughts on Boumediene. Obviously, there’s already a lot out there, with much more yet to come. Rather than tackle the big and obvious headline stuff, or try to respond to other points already made, I want to focus on...
As our Boumediene instant symposium gets underway, I thought it might be interesting to note that the Israeli Supreme Court has just upheld the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which permits the indefinite detention of a person who does not qualify for POW status and "who has participated either directly or indirectly in hostile acts against the State of Israel...
Just to get the discussion going, I wanted to highlight the Court's analysis in Section IV of the Boumediene decision on the territorial reach of the Constitution. The precise question presented is the geographic question of whether the constitutional guarantee of the writ of habeas applies to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Before discussing the case, it is worth...
I haven't had time to come up with anything interesting or cogent about the expected but still disturbing result in Boumediene. And we have an all-star cast of guest-bloggers ready to comment, as Roger points out below. But as a place to begin, it is worth checking out Chief Justice Roberts' powerful conclusion to his dissent, which I think...
The Supreme Court has just rendered its decision in Boumediene v. Bush, announcing that the DTA procedures are not an adequate and effective substitute for habeas corpus and that the MCA operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ. Opinio Juris is very pleased to announce an “insta-symposium” to discuss the decision. We have an amazing line-up of guests, including...
Adam Liptak has an excellent front-page story in today's NYT situating the US approach to hate speech in the international context (as part of his series “American Exception"). Together with Jeremy Waldron’s recent New York Review of Books piece on the subject, could this be the leading edge of possible constitutional adjustment? It would have been mostly unthinkable as recently...
Very encouraging news out of Serbia -- Stojan Zupljanin, the commander of the Bosnian police during the war, has been arrested and will be handed over to the ICTY for prosecution:Bosnian Serb security chief Stojan Zupljanin, 56, was one of four suspects sought by the tribunal for war crimes in the territory of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Their arrest and...
For the first time, a truth and reconciliation commission has picked up stakes and moved to a foreign country to take public testimony: The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its first extraterritorial session in St. Paul Minnesota this week. The Star Tribune has the full story here. One remarkable aspect of the story is the size of the...
My thanks to Mohsen al Attar for his comments on my Article, and to the editors of Opinio Juris and the Yale Journal of International Law for organizing this symposium. Mohsen al Attar’s comments bring the historical critique of global capitalist arrangements to the contemporary project of human rights, particularly the under-recognized “sub-set” of economic and social rights. He responds to...
Ideas about global capitalism have been in constant flux since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, imperialist theorists such as Hobson and Hilferding argued that inter-state rivalries would bring down the castle; WWI and WWII seemed poised to do just that. Fast-forward to the 1950s and not only did this not happen but the castle was...
