[Robert E. Williams, Jr. is an associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University and an expert on corruption in Equatorial Guinea]. The other shoe has dropped in the U.S. Government’s corruption case against Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue. Last week, a civil forfeiture complaint was unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California as a second...
The Naval War College has published the latest volume in its Blue Book series. Here is the description and information about how to obtain it (although you can simply get the PDF here): The Naval War College International Law Department recently published volume 87 of its International Law Studies "Blue Book" series. The Blue Book has served as...
That was the candid assessment of outgoing ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo at the recent ASIL Midyear meeting held at UCLA this past weekend. In a free-flowing and unusually frank discussion of the International Criminal Court to a packed assembly, Moreno-Ocampo admitted that there is "one standard for 119 member states, and another standard for every other country." He...
Tonight's episode of The Good Wife featured a Muslim-American man -- a former Army translator in Afghanistan -- who sues the U.S. government for torture and ends up being accused of supporting al-Qaeda. It was quite a fascinating episode; it's not everyday that a mainstream television show is built around Executive Order 13324, which blocks property and prohibits transactions with...
My thanks to Dave Glazier, Detlev Vagts, Roger Clark, and Devin Pendas for their insightful comments on my book. At the risk of sounding like I’ve plagiarized my response at EJIL: Talk!, I find it difficult to respond to those comments, because I almost completely agree with them. But I’ll give it a shot… Glazier My basic response to...
I am deeply grateful to both my co-bloggers at Opinio Juris and the editors of EJIL: Talk! – particularly my friends Marko Milanovic and Dapo Akande – for this remarkable opportunity to discuss my new book. I look forward to hearing what the impressive, and frankly intimidating, group of commenters have to say about it. I wrote this book for one...
Opinio Juris and EJIL: Talk! are happy to announce that we will be hosting two joint book discussions. The first book is OJ's own Kevin Heller's The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford UP). That discussion starts today. We have a fantastic lineup of discussants, to whom we are most grateful for their time...
I have just returned from teaching international humanitarian law in Nairobi. Two al-Shabaab grenade attacks not far from my hotel notwithstanding, it was one of the greatest professional experiences of my life. The training was organized by the Brussels-based International Association of Professionals in Humanitarian Assistance and Protection (PHAP), in conjunction with the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict...
Ruti Teitel’s new book, Humanity’s Law, is an ambitious effort to make sense of the international legal landscape of our post-Cold War, post-9/11 world. Rejecting formalist distinctions between legal paradigms, she sketches out a bold synthesis of recent legal trends away from a state-centered understanding of international law and toward an international legal order in which individuals are the key...
I have posted a substantially revised version of my essay "A Sentence-Based Theory of Complementarity" on SSRN. The essay is appearing in two different forms. The long version (23,000 words) -- the one I've posted -- is forthcoming in Volume 53 of the Harvard International Law Journal. The short version (7,000 words), which focuses on the new theory of complementarity...
As Roger has pointed out, the Ninth Circuit has just released a blockbuster ATS decision in the Rio Tinto case. There is a great deal to like in the decision, particularly concerning the liability of corporations under the ATS, but it's regrettable that the majority refused to address the knowledge/intent "debate" concerning the mens rea of aid and abetting under...
In my previous post, I responded to Mike's attempt to explain the amicus brief's distortion of ICTY jurisprudence. In this post, I want to respond to his similar attempt to explain the amicus brief's distortion of the Rome Statute. There are two basic issues: Article 10 of the Rome Statute's relationship to customary international law, and the importance of Article...
