[Steven Groves is a Bernard and Barbara Lomas Fellow at The Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C.] Many thanks to Julian Ku for inviting me to participate in this UNCLOS debate on one of my favorite websites. There is much I agree with in the posts of Professors Kraska, Noyes, and Allen. Professor Kraska correctly emphasizes the victory achieved by U.S. negotiators at UNCLOS...
[Jeremy Rabkin is Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law.] I entirely accept what James Kraska says about the benefits of the navigation rules in UNCLOS. But when Kraska and others say these rules are favorable, they mean the UNCLOS rules – as American officials would interpret them. Unfortunately, UNCLOS doesn’t leave it up to American officials to interpret...
OK, that is a little overdramatic. Still, the U.S. government has effectively switched sides in the upcoming Supreme Court case: Kiobel v Royal Dutch Shell. In the first incarnation of this case, the U.S. government had filed a brief supporting the petitioners and rejecting the lower court's holding that corporations cannot be sued under the Alien Tort Statute. But in a...
I wanted to thank Professors Allen, Kraska, and Noyes for their contributions to our discussion on US ratification of UNCLOS. I've learned a great deal from their posts and I hope our readers have as well. I wanted to remind our readers, however, that we will hear from two leading scholars tomorrow -- Jeremy Rabkin and Steven Groves -- who...
[John E. Noyes is the Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at California Western School of Law.] The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee is currently holding hearings on U.S. acceptance of the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, as modified by the 1994 Part XI Implementation Agreement (the “LOS Convention”). The Committee favorably reported the LOS Convention in 2004...
Public Citizen, an anti-free trade group based here in the U.S., sent around an email detailing its objections to a leaked draft text of the ongoing TransPacific Partnership negotiations, which would create a massive Pacific free-trade zone. Its main complaint is not actually to the free-trade portion of the agreement, but to the proposals for a robust investor-state dispute resolution...
I want to congratulate my friend Andrew Cayley, the Chief International Co-Prosecutor of the ECCC and a barrister at London's Doughty Street Chambers, on being named QC in England. Given the constant turmoil that has roiled the ECCC over the past year, the news is a welcome (re-)affirmation of Andrew's legal ability. The ECCC is lucky to have him....
[Leila Hanafi works as regional coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the Coalition for the International Criminal Court. This contribution is cross-posted at the Middle East Monitor.] The ongoing post-conflict reconstruction process in Libya is reigniting a crucial debate among transitional justice advocates as to the role the International Criminal Court (ICC) can play in delivering justice and...
When is an arbitral panel an international tribunal for purposes of Section 1782? Section 1782, of course, is the statute that authorizes federal courts to order discovery in aid of proceedings before foreign courts and international tribunals. As discussed in a forthcoming article in the Virginia Journal of International Law entitled, Ancillary Discovery to Prove Denial of Justice,...
[David Davenport is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution] In the end, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court made the only “legal” decision he could: the ICC has no jurisdiction to act on the complaint of the Palestinian National Authority since Palestine is not a State and the Court is limited to accepting submissions by States. The only case in favor...
Last week I had the good fortune to attend a reception in Washington D.C. with various arbitration luminaries announcing the inauguration of the Jerusalem Arbitration Center. With almost $5 billion in annual trade between Palestine and Israel, it is imperative to establish a neutral forum for resolving business disputes. JAC is established under the auspices of the...
