My dear friend and sometimes co-author, David Rieff, has an opinion piece in today's Los Angeles Times, evincing great skepticism about calls for outside military intervention to deliver aid in Burma. "Save Us From the Rescuers, LA Times Opinion, May 18, 2007. The piece is closely related to Kevin's post citing John Boonstra's concerns that the meaning of...
My thanks to everyone at Opinio Juris for inviting me to guest blog this week. I am a very big admirer of this blog and have been since its beginning - I admire its political balance, its civility, and the high intellectual standards it sets. Plus it's fun to read. I'll try to live up to those...
Having grown up on Green Lantern comics (and having one friend quip that she thinks that explains my becoming an international lawyer), I was nonetheless somewhat stunned to come across the following on Wagner James Au’s New World Notes blog, which covers the evolution of Second Life, the online “virtual world”:Second Life has a Darfur, so it’s sad (though...
I have thought all along that bringing an ICJ case against Iran for "incitement to genocide" against Jews in Israel is a useless gesture (and one with a weak legal footing to boot). But former U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney seemed attracted by the idea, and now, new Australian Prime Minister Paul Rudd is saying that Australia...
The California Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage wasn't the only good human-rights news yesterday. Also exciting is the Court of Arbitration for Sport's decision to allow Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee sprinter, to compete for a place in the Beijing Olympics:The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied...
In a strange move, the Supreme Court on Monday affirmed the ATS Apartheid case of Khulamani v. Barclay Bank (recaptioned at the Supreme Court as American Isuzu Motors v. Ntsebeza). The stated reason? The Court lacked a quorum. From the docket sheet: Because the Court lacks a quorum, 28 U.S.C. § 1, and since a majority of the...
Chimene detects some nostalgia in Beyond Citizenship's suggestion that America may be unsustainable in the long run. But how could I not be nostalgic? I'm an American, and America has had a pretty good run of it. At least I recognize the nostalgia. One thing that is both fascinating and frustrating about engaging on citizenship issues...
I had contemplated weighing in on commentators' unfortunate tendency to equate the Responsibility to Protect doctrine with humanitarian invasion, but John Boonstra at UN Dispatch beat me to it. Here's a snippet:First, by and large, the R2P doctrine has been misunderstood or misrepresented in calls to "invade" Burma. R2P is often implied to boil down to a simple equation:...
Thanks to Ken for injecting the Ignatieff observation, with which I emphatically disagree! Nation-states are useful handmaidens to the superclass, but the real elites could do just fine without them, thank you very much. It's nice to have safe streets in places New York and London, but that's the business of local governments, not national ones. In...
Thanks again to Peter, without whose terrific book we couldn't have done this, and who has responded challengingly and gracefully throughout this conversation. It's been a lot of fun. I want to reassure John that he really isn't the only one here skeptical of global governance. Speaking for myself, I'm not such a fan either. Governance institutions tend...
I want to thank Peter for inviting me to participate in this discussion. It has been very useful and clarifying. I will close with a few thoughts. Peter's book addresses what will become the major issue of world politics in the 21st century and I'm grateful for his efforts. He has made a strong descriptive case (as has Alex and...
We have talked a little bit about assimilation. What I believe is important for strengthening our democracy is what I call "patriotic assimilation. I'm going to sketch this out a little. What is “patriotic assimilation”? First, it does not mean giving up all ethnic traditions, customs, cuisine, and birth languages. It has nothing to do with the food one eats,...
