Nearly 100 nations have reached an agreement on a draft treaty to ban the use of cluster bombs within 8 years. This may or may not be a good idea. But since key cluster bomb producers and users like the United States, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan are not signatories, the importance of this treaty, beyond...
We all know the adage that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. In a recent op-ed, Mark Shulman of Pace Law School shows how if only the Bush Administration had remembered history, they may have repeated it. Shulman, who besides being a lawyer also has a doctorate in history and a particular expertise in military history,...
Well, gentle readers, my week of guest blogging at Opinio Juris is coming to an end. I've had a wonderful time, and certainly allowed my indulgences to get indulged in picking topics to write about. Hope you haven't found it too far adrift from international law. But I want to thank all the folks at Opinio Juris...
The Copenhagen Consensus is the brain child of self-described 'skeptical environmentalist' and statistician Bjorn Lomborg; housed at the Copenhagen Business School, it seeks to apply cost benefit analysis to the world's leading problems in development, poverty, the environment, etc., with the assistance of a range of leading economists, and come up with not just a list of issues, but a...
On Friday, the ICJ issued its judgment in Sovereignty over Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh, Middle Rocks and South Ledge (Malaysia/Singapore). A summary sent by the ICJ stated thatit had found by 12 votes to four that Pedra Blanca/Pulau Batu Puteh, a granite island in the Straits of Singapore on which a lighthouse stands, belongs to Singapore and has done so...
Memorial Day for a long time in my life didn't mean much of anything; I came of age in the 1970s just slightly too late for the Vietnam war, remembrance of which was all too weird for a long time, and anyhow there weren't that many wars going on, at least not ones that I was aware of. So...
With so many failed terrorism prosecutions to cover — see, for example, here, here, and here — the media can be forgiven for overlooking one here or there. Still, it's a shame that the Bush administration's most recent failure, the baseless prosecution of Dr. Steven Kurtz on bioterror charges, has not received more attention. It's an ugly story. Kurtz,...
I know it's not international law, but this site is too cool not to mention: Just enter your address and it will calculate your "Walk Score" — how walkable your neighborhood is. It even maps all the interesting businesses that are nearby. I entered my old address in Athens, Georgia, and my walk score was 75, walkable enough not...
Financial intermediation is a dicey proposition these days, and 'asset securitization' a downright dirty word in a world in which securitization allowed the obfuscation of risk - purses from sows' ears, but actually just fancy looking sows' ears, it turns out, everywhere you looked. Nonetheless, one of the important longterm issues for microfinance (and for the whole, newly emerging...
Wednesday’s NY Times had a good essay by Thomas Friedman on the current evolution of the global distribution of power. He argues that there are actually three shifts taking place: The first shift is due to our “oil addiction”:Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned...
My colleagues have often discussed the dangers of globalization in these pages. Nevertheless, I fear they have overlooked one of the most pernicious: embarrassing car names. There are 2,261 different written languages in the world, essentially guaranteeing that at least some car names will mean something untoward in one of them. Witness the Ford Pinto, Portuguese...
