The article, which is available in draft form on SSRN, is entitled "'One Hell of a Killing Machine': Signature Strikes and International Law." It is forthcoming in the Journal of International Criminal Justice as part of a mini-symposium on targeted killing edited by Cornell's Jens Ohlin. Here is the abstract: The vast majority of drone attacks conducted by the U.S. have...
I've long wondered whether and when the American Law Institute (ALI) might try to update its 3rd Restatement on the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. Since its 1987 publication, the two-volume set, culled together under the leadership of Professor Lou Henkin, has had a tremendous impact. It has been a frequent resource for U.S. courts and American international...
We are happy to announce that this Monday Professor Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School will join Opinio Juris as our newest member. Kristen’s articles range across a variety of topics in international law and, in particular, she has become a respected scholar regarding questions of the responsibility of international organizations and of states. She also writes...
Jack Goldsmith offers five thoughts today at Lawfare about the D.C. Circuit's Hamdan II decision. I agree with two of his thoughts -- that the government is free to rely in future prosecutions on alternatives to material support (MST) such as aiding and abetting terrorism, and that (sadly) al-Bahlul could be detained indefinitely if he is ultimately acquitted by his...
Over the next three days we are bringing you a discussion of a brand new book, edited by Joost Pauwelyn (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva), Ramses Wessel (University of Twente, The Netherlands) and Jan Wouters (University of Leuven, Belgium), on Informal International Lawmaking, published by Oxford University Press. Here is the abstract provided by the publisher: Many international...
I want to briefly interrupt the LJIL symposium to flag the fact that the Bond case is back on the U.S. Supreme Court's radar screen and with it the prospect that the Court may revisit one of the most canonical cases of U.S. foreign relations law: Missouri v. Holland. The facts are a bit lurid -- Carol Anne Bond discovered that her husband had...
Last week, while I was participating in a conference, I received an email from Google with a puzzling subject line: "Subpoena Notice from Google (Internal Ref. No. 257121)." I opened the email, assuming that it was some kind of sophisticated phishing attempt. It wasn't. It was Google informing me -- more than a little cryptically -- that Chevron had subpoenaed...
Yesterday, Harold Koh, the Legal Adviser of the U.S. State Department, spoke at the U.S. Cyber Command Inter-Agency Legal Conference on the applicability of international law to cyberspace and, particularly, cyberwar/ cyberconflict. For a couple of takes on the speech, see the Washington Post here and Defense News, here. In our ongoing efforts to make full-text presentations of international...
A few weeks ago, I wrote a long post explaining the one way in which the absence of due process in a national prosecution could make a case admissible before the ICC. The post drew a distinction between two different kinds of national prosecutions: (1) one that fails to satisfy international standards of due process; and (2) one that fails...
At risk of dipping back into this touchy subject, there's this interesting development as reported in today's NY Times: Google has blocked the film that has provoked embassy (and now KFC) attacks from youTube sites in Libya and Egypt: Google said it decided to block the video in response to violence that killed four American diplomatic personnel in Libya. The company...
The deplorable killing of Chris Stevens in Libya suggests a foreign relations law rationale for banning hate speech. Remember, the Benghazi protests were prompted by this film depicting the prophet Mohammed in not very flattering terms. The equation from the protesters at the US consulate in Benghazi: this film was produced by an American; we will hold America responsible for it. The...
Amidst the memorials to 9/11 yesterday came more tragic news with mob attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the consulate in Benghazi, including the deaths of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. My condolences go out to the victims' families and the U.S. Foreign Service community, the Marines who guard them, as well as the local...
