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...
The following article was written by Sonya Sceats, Associate Fellow in International Law at Chatham House in London. It first appeared in The World Today, Chatham House's journal. I am reprinting it here for our readers who are interested in the more recent activities of the Iraqi High Tribunal. Rowdy sessions of the Iraq High Tribunal attracted sensational daily...
Via Crooked Timber, I learned today that Charles Tilly, one of the great political and historical sociologists of his time, has died. The news makes me very sad, because Chuck was one of the most important academic influences in my life: I took every class he offered, from "Introduction to Political Sociology" to a three-person independent study on social...
Now here is a great legal question regarding geographic appellations: Is the term "lesbian" something that the residents of Lesbos, Greece have a legal entitlement to prevent others from misusing? The Associate Press has the story: A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world's gay women....
The American Lawyer has just published a great article on the future of law firms. The bottom line: successful law firms will be global operations with thousands of lawyers led by an elite group of partners with staggering profits-per-partner. Here is an excerpt: The projections make it clear that U.S. corporate law firms of the future will be...
Simon Chesterman of NYU passed along the following summary and link to the report prepared by NYU Law School's Institute for International Law and Justice in collaboration with the Austrian Government titled, "The UN Security Council and the Rule of Law: The Role of the Security Council in Strengthening a Rule-based International System." It looks to be a useful contribution...
Longtime readers may recall my previous obsession with the seemingly endless Lumber Wars between Canada and the U.S. over Canadian timber subsidies and U.S. tariffs punishing such subsidies. The dispute threatened NAFTA, or at least Chapter 19 of NAFTA, because of the U.S. lumber industry's lawsuit to declare that chapter unconstitutional. Now it turns out that the deal to end...
