Jennifer Daskal (who, I'm delighted to say, has just accepted an offer to join the faculty at my school, Washington College of Law) has an important op-ed in the New York Times today titled, simply, "Don't Close Guantanamo." Many of us know Jen Daskal from her earlier positions in the Obama administration Justice Department and, before that, Human Rights Watch...
A number of commentators have challenged my claim that Articles 11(2) and 12(3) of the Rome Statute would permit Palestine to accept the ICC's jurisdiction retroactively, whether as a member-state or on an ad hoc basis. Here, for example, is what my friend Jennifer Trahan wrote yesterday at IntLawGrrls: Even if an entity becomes a "state," should there be jurisdiction that...
Happy Thanksgiving, the best of the American holidays ...
I have been having an interesting twitter exchange with Ben Wittes about an online "Choose Your Own Adventure" game created by the Truman National Security Project. The game, which is entitled "Tell Me How This Ends," asks you to decide how the President of the United States should respond to news that Iran has accumulated enough enriched uranium to build...
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...
The agonizing close presidential race in the U.S. has made everyone on edge about election day problems at the polls. This may explain why the State of Texas has decided to pick a fight with the election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), threatening to arrest election observers who interfere with the upcoming November 6 elections. Texas...
Earlier this week, Harold Koh gave a speech. And it wasn't about conflicts, drones, or cyberwar, topics that have dominated the attention of international lawyers in recent years. Rather, Koh's speech was a meditation on the processes of international law-making that confront the State Department on a daily basis. It was, simply put, a survey of the current international legal landscape...
My initial impression of the Kiobel oral argument is that the Supreme Court is going to do its best to do an historical analysis of the ATS and use that history to find ways to limit its scope. It could do so by holding that the ATS does not apply extraterritorially, or that it does not apply unless there is...
John Witt's magisterial new book, Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History, appeared a few weeks ago, and Gary Bass has an enthusiastic review of it in yesterday's New York Times Sunday Book Review. I am only about half-way through it, but Bass' enthusiasm is entirely justified - it is a fabulous book and one that I think...
Having followed the terrorism litigation against Iran for years, I was fascinated to read of the recent legislation—Section 502 of the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights--that creates a legislative fix for victims of one particular group of terrorist victims but not thousands of others. The law in question grants plaintiffs/judgment creditors in one and only one case—Peterson...
