One hundred eighty-eight years ago today, on February 22, 1819, the United States and Spain signed the Adams-Onís Treaty (also known as the Florida Purchase Treaty or the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819) by which the United States acquired Florida from Spain and the two countries settled their boundary dispute regarding the western territories. Thanks to the treaty we became...
A fascinating debate has been taking place this week concerning a post on Instapundit in which Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, advocated assassinating Iranian atomic scientists and "radical mullahs." Here is Reynold's original post: IRAN IN IRAQ: Smoking guns. This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why...
In this excellent article in Foreign Policy, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon argue that human psychology explains the tendency for hawks to win out over doves on decisions to go to war. As decisions makers weigh arguments for and against the use of force, psychological biases — rather than politics or strategy — may pre-dispose them toward hawkishness: Social and...
David Ignatius notes in today's WaPo America's worsening reputation among our "friends" in the Middle East: Let's start with some poll numbers presented at the Doha conference by Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and a fellow of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, which co-sponsored the conference with the Qatari foreign ministry. The polling was done last year...
Honestly, it's things like this that explain why I sometimes fail to choose my words carefully when I'm criticizing the Bush Administration. From the Sparta Independent, courtesy of Americablog:To the Editor: I have a son going to Iraq this summer. I was able to afford to buy state-of-the-art body armor for his protection. Unfortunately there are many parents that are...
How much of a disaster is the Iraq War? If the editors of Foreign Policy are correct, a major one. Here, according to the magazine's most recent cover story, are the top 10 "winners" in Iraq: 1. Iran 2. Moqtada al-Sadr 3. Al-Qaeda 4. Samuel Huntington (for his "clash of civilizations" thesis) 5. China 6. Arab Dictators 7. The Price of Oil (and not from...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has dismissed a habeas petition by a number of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, holding that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 deprives federal courts of jurisdiction over these detainees' cases. (The opinion is uploaded here). The majority also finds that there is no Suspension Clause problem in the...
There is a fascinating case brewing at ICSID concerning new laws established by the South African government to redress historical, social, and economic inequalities in the mining and energy sectors. Luke Peterson of Investment Treaty News has the details: European-based investors in South Africa's mining industry have mounted an international arbitration against the South African Government alleging that that country's...
Duke Law School hosted a workshop last week with a great line-up on the Law and Politics of International Delegation. Papers are available here. ...
Today is the anniversary of a shameful event in US history: the 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of German-, Italian- and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Two House Representatives from California, Xavier Becerra and Dan Lundgren are today introducing a bill in Congress to bring attention and some small amount of justice to the...
1948 is a new international law blog from Otto Spijkers and Richard Norman. It is based out of the University of Leiden. Why is the blog called 1948? I 'll let them explain:1948 was a leap year, beginning on a Thursday. More importantly, 1948 saw the creation of the Organization of American States, the Berlin Blockade and the beginnings...
Last week, the Southern District of New York offered up a nice, succinct, high quality opinion on treaty interpretation that does a wonderful job of looking at plain meaning, object and purpose to interpret an ambiguous phrase in the Montreal Convention. There is nothing exciting about Baah v. Virgin Atlantic Airways (2007 WL 424993)--it related to injuries suffered from hot beverages...
