[Spencer Zifcak is Allan Myers Professor of Law and Director of the Institute of Legal Studies at the Australian Catholic University.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. My article on this subject attempts to encapsulate the standing of coercive (Pillar 3) intervention within the framework...
The Melbourne Journal of International Law is delighted to continue our partnership with Opinio Juris. This week will feature three articles from Issue 13(1) of the Journal. The full issue is available for download here. Today, our discussion commences with Spencer Zifcak’s article ‘The Responsibility to Protect after Libya and Syria’. Professor Zifcak draws on the disparate responses to the humanitarian...
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...
Kevin and I have still never met in person, but we've already had our first twitter encounter last week on the legality of a U.S. military response to the attacks that killed the U.S. Ambassador in Libya (as well as three other Americans). Although the news reports on the attacks are not exactly clear, some have suggested that there is...
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...
Argentina is, to put it bluntly, one of the world’s greatest sovereign deadbeats, defaulting on its sovereign bonds more than once as well as bearing the distinction of being the world’s number one respondent in ICSID arbitration claims (or at least close to number one). Last week, the ongoing struggle between foreign creditors and Argentina found a new flashpoint as...
Julian beat me to Eric Posner's new Slate article on the legality of drone strikes. I don't agree with everything in it, but I think it's notable that Posner -- echoing his sometime co-author Jack Goldsmith -- rejects the idea that international law permits self-defense against a non-state actor whenever a state is "unable or unwilling" to prevent the NSA...
The Japanese Prime Minister made clear in remarks yesterday that he has no intention of proposing international arbitration to settle or mediate the ongoing Senkaku/Diaoyu Island dispute with China. Indeed, China's government-controlled English language paper, noted the inconsistency of Japan's position given its willingness to send its similar dispute with South Korea to the ICJ. (A point I noted here). Noda...
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...