Stories like this cause barely a ripple of controversy:Girls may be given free access to the emergency contraceptive pill at their local Auckland pharmacies in a bid to reduce teen pregnancies and abortions. The medicine can already be sold by many pharmacists without a doctor's prescription, including to girls without parental consent. An Auckland District Health Board committee will tomorrow consider a...
How desperate is the ICTR to fulfill its completion strategy by dumping cases on Rwanda? Enough to disavow the NGO on which it has relied on for nearly 14 years:The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) when presenting last week his motion in favour of transfer of genocide accused Yusuf Munyakazi to Rwanda, clearly distanced himself...
Jose Ernesto Medellin is scheduled for execution by the state of Texas on August 5, 2008. If one assumes that Executive Branch officials have an interest in trying to find new ways to comply with the Avena decision (an open question I know), that does not leave them much time. From my perspective, the Executive Branch has two,...
One of the more intriguing questions from the oral argument in the child rape death penalty case of Kennedy v. Louisiana is whether evolving standards of decency are a one-way ratchet. Here is Justice Stevens' question from the oral argument last month: [O]ne question that interests me but is a little divorced from the terms of the arguments so far....
I didn't notice until recently (and thanks to one of my Hofstra colleagues) that Pope Benedict's recent address to the United Nations included a rather learned disquisition on international law theory. The Pope has a pretty traditional liberal internationalist conception of things but it is certainly smart and sophisticated. Here is an interesting snippet, which might be...
I doubt there is any international law relevant to this emerging crisis in Bolivia, where certain regions are seeking "autonomy" (but not independence) from the central government. Still, it is serious enough to spur international action (the OAS is on the case). And perhaps it is a prelude to secession, and autonomy is laying the groundwork. I don't know...
Earlier this week the WTO Appellate Body clarified the role of legal precedent in WTO jurisprudence. The background to the discussion was a WTO panel’s refusal to follow a previous Appellate Body decision because the panel viewed the previous Appellate Body decision as failing to accord proper deference to permissible Member State interpretations. The details of the panel decision...
Critics of the U.S. war on terrorism often suggest that it is not a "real war" and that it is merely a slogan. Indeed, many critics reject the "war" paradigm completely. That's a fair argument, but it is worth remembering that there are traditional war-like aspects of the war on terrorism that don't neatly fit in the law-enforcement...
Marty Lederman has kindly published a long post I have written on what — if anything — the Justice Case has to say about the criminal responsibility of government lawyers like Yoo. Here is the introduction:Scholars who argue that John Yoo’s authorship of the infamous torture memos makes him complicit in various war crimes -– torture, illegal detention, etc....
I'll strike this up to strange timing. On the same day of reports of increasing tensions between Russia and Georgia, including Russian troop movements along the Russian/Georgian border and an increase of Russian forces in the Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, CNN runs a piece on...
As regular readers know, I have been critical of Washington & Lee's move toward a third-year experiential learning program, fearing that it would marginalize international law courses. Well, those fears were put to rest yesterday when the faculty at W&L unanimously approved a mandatory three-hour first-year Transnational Law course. The description of the course is as follows: This...
As a brief follow-up to Sonya's post, it's worth noting that the IHT began trying Tariq Aziz, Saddam's deputy prime minister and the highest ranking Christian in Saddam's regime, earlier this week:Iraq's former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was known as the 'Ace of Spades' in the United States' deck of playing cards of Iraq's most wanted. But he was better-known...
