In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

04 Apr

Nominations began Monday for seats on the new U.N. Human Rights Council. According to Reuters, 17 nations have already nominated themselves including Germany, Greece, Portugal, Switzerland, Algeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Ukraine, Latvia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua. The U.S. has not yet acted. 47 seats are available with seven from Western Europe and...

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03 Apr

Way back during the Cold War, an international or foreign policy blog like this one would be obsessed with arms control, especially nuclear arms control. Today, the major nuclear powers continue to reduce or even eliminate their strategic nuclear arsenals (see this press release and report) and, pursuant to international treaties, they disclose exact numbers of strategic nuclear assets....

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03 Apr

Justice Holmes famously argued that “If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer...

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03 Apr

In another weird twist to the already odd Charles Taylor saga, the former Liberian President is claiming that Nigerian security services first helped him escape, then re-captured him before sending him to Liberia to stand trial. Taylor is not the most credible person, but there was something fishy going on here. In any case, Taylor is already plotting his defense. He...

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03 Apr

Interesting summary of a recent speech by Colin Powell addressing Iraq, Palestine, China, Russia, Europe, globalization, and immigration. Best line: "My favorite [Powell joke] was about buying all State Department employees Blackberries (when he arrived the State Dept. still had Wang Computers so he wired every desk and bought them all Blackberries), but that one employee was using it as a...

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02 Apr

The cover story of today’s NY Times Magazine by Elizabeth Rubin is entitled “If Not Peace, then Justice.” The text on the cover reads: The U.N is not going to stop the genocide in Darfur. The African Union is not going to stop the genocide in Darfur. The U.S. is not going to stop the genocide in Darfur. NATO is not going to stop...

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02 Apr

When I teach the introductory international law class to my students, one of the more difficult aspects of the discussion is the line between customary state practices that rise to the level of binding norms, and those that do not. We all teach Paquete Habana, and the students' eyes glaze over as we passionately discuss the law of prize and...

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01 Apr

A federal district court in Washington yesterday declared the presence of “nonconsenting American troops” in Iraq unconstitutional and ordered the Bush Administration to cease further deployment of any American soldiers in Iraq, to the extent those soldiers were members of the class action. The case, Sherman v. Rumsfeld, was brought as a class action on behalf of current soldiers...

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31 Mar

This morning at the ASIL Annual Meeting Ruth Wedgwood of Johns Hopkins and Philippe Sands of the University of London debated the legality of the War in Iraq. They gave 25 minute presentations before a bench of “judges” comprised of (real life) Judge Diane Wood of the Seventh Circuit, Christine Chinkin of the London School of Economics, and Yoram Dinstein...

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31 Mar

Is Justice Kennedy a treaty lawyer? Listening to him yesterday during his speech to the 100th Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, you would think he’s at least been studying up on the subject. As Peggy pointed out, Justice Kennedy’s wide-ranging talk focused most closely on the problem of genocide, and his comments in that...

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