David Bosco has an essay at Foreign Policy arguing that the current financial and security crises, rather than weakening international intitutions, are strengthening them. In short, there are so few options, that leaders are turning to international organizations and relying on them. But there may also be a more fundamental shift that is occurring in international economic policymaking: ...
How could I have missed this? According the Guardian: The principality of Liechtenstein has decided to make itself available to private clients, from $70,000 (£43,000) a night, complete with customised street signs and temporary currency...
Read the Harry Potter books and/or seen all the movies? Concerned about the post-conflict issues after the end of the War with Osama bin Laden Voldemort? The folks at Foreign Policy have got your back, tying together recent articles on post-conflict studies with the Harry Potter universe. (Warning: Spoilers!) Who knew Hogsmeade and Kandahar could have so much in common?...
Or so it would seem, based on this analysis from the European Center for Law and Justice, a right-leaning public interest law firm. A proposed new law in Poland appears to ban abortion under any circumstance, thus replacing the current law, which allows exemptions for the mother's health and for cases of rape and incest. If, as the ECLJ argues,...
So I leave the country and the blogosphere for a few months, and what happens? (Well, beside that "war" in Libya), circuit courts have gone all negative on my argument against corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute. In addition to the D.C. Circuit's recent decision, the Seventh Circuit (speaking through Judge Posner) went out of its way to reject...
[This post is part of the Second Harvard International Law Journal/Opinio Juris Symposium.] In 2007, I authored two papers -- one for a military audience and another for a legal one -- arguing that debates over the law's response to the growing range of cyberthreats would likely track ongoing debates over law's response to terrorism. In that context, we've seen 4 options...
The following is a guest-post by Mark Kersten. Mark is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of the (excellent) blog Justice in Conflict. His research examines the nexus of conflict resolution and the pursuit of international criminal justice. Trying to Get to the Bottom of the “Peace versus Justice” Debate...
Last week Julian Ku and I had the pleasure of working with Business Roundtable and a wonderful group of international law scholars--Rudolf Dolzer, Burkhard Hess, Herbert Kronke, Davis Robinson, Christoph Schreuer, and Janet Walker--on a Second Circuit amicus brief addressing the propriety of antisuit injunctions under international law. The amicus brief addresses an appeal of Judge Kaplan of the...
Humberto Leal is scheduled for execution in Texas on July 7th. A Mexican national, Leal was not notified of his right to consular assistance under the Vienna Convention of Consular Relations. In light of the International Court of Justice's decision in the Avena case (Mexico v. U.S.), Congress is currently working on legislation to bring the U.S. into compliance with its international...
I am delighted to announce the publication of my book "The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law." The book can be ordered from Oxford University Press here; Amazon should have it (at a whopping $8.78 discount) in the next few days. Here for the last time is the cover: Once again, I want to thank...
Earlier today, the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review (CMCR) held in U.S. v. Hamdan that material support for terrorism is a war crime and thus within the jurisdiction of the military commissions. The decision represents the apotheosis of the US's utterly self-referential approach to international law, because the CMCR managed to reach that conclusion without citing a single non-American...
More than a decade ago, the U.S. Defense Department's Office of General Counsel (DoD OGC) released a detailed analysis of the way international law would operate to guide U.S. military activity in cyberspace. It was an impressive effort and is still worth reading today despite all the intervening, and dramatic, changes in the technology and the geopolitical landscape. At the...
