José Padilla—who this past August was convicted of terrorism conspiracy—and John Yoo, one of, if not the, legal architect of the U.S. response to 9/11—have become near-household names in the fights over U.S. detention policies in the so-called "Global War on Terror." Today, that fight took on a much more personal character, as Padilla (and his mother) sued John...
The Pew Research Center has a nice end-of-the-year roundup of public opinion. According to Pew, here are the top public opinion stories of the year that have international themes (numbered in the order they placed in the overall listing): 7. A Better View of Iraq, Up to a Point… For years, public views of the war in Iraq were increasingly negative...
I am at the AALS conference in New York and don't have as much time to blog as I would like, but I want to flag a critically important recent decision by a magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York holding that human-rights groups have the same right as journalists to protect the confidentiality of their sources:A United...
I notice that none of us have posted on the Israeli military assault on Gaza. This is not surprising, there is very little useful to say about it, especially from a legal point of view. There is something depressingly predictable about the commentary arising out of Israel's military incursion into Gaza. Critics of Israeli policy in general have denounced the incursion, alleging...
The New York Times has an extremely interesting article on the role of availability cascades in media coverage of global warming. Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels...
It’s a happy new year (of sorts) for U.S. Human Rights Groups concerned about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur. For the last several years, groups such as the Save Darfur Coalition have pushed state and local governments to divest from companies that invest or do business with Sudan. Their efforts have produced some impressive results --since 2005,...
Or something like that. More precisely, Iran's government is peeved at continuing findings from an Argentine court holding the Iranian government responsible for the 1992 bombing of a Jewish in Buenos Aires and is threatening ICJ litigation. Prosecutor General Qorbanali Dorri Najafabadi on Monday stressed that Iran will lodge complaint with international court against Argentine government over repetition of unfounded allegation...
According to the UK's Herald: US special forces snatch squads are on standby to seize or disable Pakistan's nuclear arsenal in the event of a collapse of government authority or the outbreak of civil war following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The troops, augmented by volunteer scientists from America's Nuclear Emergency Search Team organisation, are under orders to take control of an...
A federal district court in Los Angeles has rendered an important decision dismissing claims for alleged victims of the Armenian Genocide. At issue in Deirmenjian v. Deutsche Bank is a California statute, Code of Civil Procedure § 354.45, which extended until December 31, 2016 the statute of limitations for, inter alia, looted assets claims brought by victims of...
As I have written before, the US has done much to minimize the unfairness of the Iraqi High Tribunal. Unfortunately, it has done exactly the opposite regarding Bilal Hussein, the Pulitzer-Prize winning AP photojournalist who has been imprisoned by the US military since April 2006 — most of the time without charge — and is only now facing prosecution...
I'm normally loathe to link to stories most readers will likely find themselves, but I'm making an exception for The Bush Administration's Top 10 Stupidest Legal Arguments of 2007, put together by my friend and law-school classmate Dahlia Lithwick. Here are the headings, arranged by increasing stupidity:10. The NSA's eavesdropping was limited in scope. 9. Scooter Libby's sentence was commuted...
Matt Yglesias picks up on this piece in yesterday's LA Times by UN Dispatch blogger, Mark Leon Goldberg. Seems part of the problem in Darfur is a lack of helicopters: On Nov. 27, Reuters reported that shortages of helicopters are hobbling U.N. missions all over the world. "A shortage of top-end machines needed for tropical conditions plus a reluctance of...
