During the most recent U.S. presidential debate, candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton competed over who was against U.S. participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and who was REALLY against NAFTA. Interestingly, both candidates essentially pledged to, if elected, threaten to withdraw from NAFTA in order to force Canada and Mexico to renegotiate. As a policy...
From TPM Muckraker:[Y]ou may have despaired of ever seeing a clear, unequivocal exchange on the topic with a government official. Like this one from today's hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, with Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency: Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) asked, "General, do you believe that waterboarding is consistent with Common Article...
[John Paul Jones is Professor of Law at Richmond Law School and is an expert in maritime law.] I’ve been invited to call your attention to the case of Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, for which a writ of certiorari went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Oral argument before the Supreme Court is scheduled...
The following is a guest post by Sonya Sceats, an Associate Fellow in International Law at Chatham House in London. Tomorrow could be the end of the road for the UK's long campaign against a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg which prevents the removal of terror suspects to countries where they face a 'real risk' of...
Not really, says Noel Malcolm, a senior research fellow at Oxford, in today's Guardian:"Kosovo is Serbia", "Ask any historian" read the unlikely placards, waved by angry Serb demonstrators in Brussels on Sunday. This is rather flattering for historians: we don't often get asked to adjudicate. It does not, however, follow that any historian would agree, not least because historians do...
According to surveys conducted in 2000, 73% of Americans believe that higher rates of immigration lead to higher crime rates. If a new study by the Public Policy Institute of California is any indication, they don't:Key findings in the report Crime, Corrections, and California: What Does Immigration Have to Do with It?:People born outside the United States make up...
The D.C. Circuit last month issued an interesting decision in Belhas v. Ya'alon on a possible jus cogens exception to the FSIA. The case presented the possibility that a government official committing jus cogens violations cannot be acting within his official capacity. The court rejected the argument. Here is the key excerpt of the majority and concurring...
From CNN: Think Barack Hussein Obama has it rough campaigning for president with a name like that? The Illinois senator has nothing on Frankenstein Momin. Or Billy Kid Sangma. Or Adolf Lu Hitler Marak. The three men are among dozens of others with equally colorful names who are competing for legislative seats in Meghalaya, a remote northeast Indian state, on March 3. There...
William J. Haynes II, DOD General Counsel, is stepping down from his position in March. The DOD Press Release is here. Haynes, played a critical role in decisions surrounding the application of the Geneva Conventions to detainees, the use of GTMO as a detention facility, as well as the interrogation standards to be employed there and elsewhere. ...
Over the past few weeks, the Bush administration has repeatedly tried to legitimize the military commissions by comparing them to the trials held at Nuremberg. First, William Haynes invoked Nuremberg in defense of his belief that the military commissions would provide detainees with fair trials:When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis...
When I teach Foreign Relations, the first order of business for the class is to identify every provision of the U.S. Constitution that makes some explicit reference to foreign relations. (Of course this is somewhat artificial, as there are many provisions of the Constitution that affect foreign relations even though they make no explicit mention of foreign relations.) ...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has affirmed a lower court opinion dismissing a lawsuit brought seeking damages for the U.S. military's use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War (Vietnam Ass'n for Victims of Agent Orange v. Dow Chemical Co). For me, the most interesting and doctrinally significant part of the decision is the Second...
