Lest I be accused of being overly critical of the US Supreme Court, I will now try to the show what must qualify as one of the worst examples of manipulation and instrumentalization of international law in recent memory. Predictably, that legal manipulation was not a brain child of the Supreme Court, but of the ever inventive lawyers working for...
Last week, I noted that Japan will become a member the ICC in October. Interestingly, the Japanese government has indicated that it will not consider signing an Article 98 agreement with the U.S. after accession. That refusal will not have much practical effect, although there are approximately 50,000 U.S. soldiers on Japanese territory, more than half of whom...
Following up on my previous post, the military commander in charge of Guantanamo Bay, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, has announced that he no longer supports limiting defense attorneys to three visits with their internee clients:But in an interview with The Miami Herald and Saudi Press Agency on Wednesday evening, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the commander, was supportive of the ongoing...
See this story from Wednesday's FT on a meeting between Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the president of El Salvador, Antonio Saca, to address the growing transnational aspects of gang-related crime. This isn't a first -- the New York City Police Department has seven liaison officers posted in foreign cities, most recently to Santo Domingo on a narcotics-related...
Based on this excerpt, can you guess the identity of this famous commencement speaker? More than any other generation of Americans, yours is tasked with resolving challenges that lie far beyond your doorstep — even far beyond America's borders. Between cell phones and the Internet, you have a world of information literally at your fingertips. And because our world is so...
I understand full well why human rights-minded people in the US feel the need to defend the Hamdan decision. It was, as Dean Harold Koh put it, an attempt at setting the world right after the Bush administration’s assertions of ever increasing executive powers and its decision to keep hundreds of people in legal limbo. I certainly sympathize with that,...
The American Branch of the International Law Association has sent out a call for panel proposals for International Law Weekend, which takes place October 25-27 in New York City. This year's theme is "Toward a New Vision of International Law," and as co-chair of the conference, I encourage proposals from the broad academic community but also from private...
My thanks to Professors Jinks, Goodman, and Slaughter for their reply, though I fear that their response is in many ways as misplaced as they think that my initial argument was. So, let me make a few things clear. The substantive point of disagreement between us is the difference between an international and a non-international armed conflict: is it in the...
[Editors' note: We welcome the following response to Marko Milanovic's initial guest post regarding the Hamdan decision. Ryan Goodman is Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School; Derek Jinks is Professor at the University of Texas Law School; and Anne-Marie Slaughter is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International...
Yesterday's immigrant demonstrations were predictably smaller than last year's, given the diminished risk that something really bad will come out of Congress at this point (remember, the House had passed a bill making presence in violation of the immigration laws a felony). As reported here in the WaPo, the emphasis at the gatherings was on keeping families intact. The...
Dianne Feinstein introduced a bill on Monday which would shut down Guantanamo. (Not clear whether it would also shut down the military commissions - the bill calls for release, detention as an enemy combatant, or prosecution before an Article II court or "military legal proceeding before a regularly-constituted court," which of course the commissions are deemed by the MCA.)...
I said a few days ago that I wanted to do a few posts on the unusual topic of the intersection between genocide and religion. Let me start this discussion by asking whether religion is somehow a factor in the decisionmaking process of those who choose to stand up and resist genocide. That was the question raised a...
