In case you haven't seen it, make sure to check out Jane Mayer's demolition of Marc Thiessen's book-length apologia for torture, "Courting Disaster." As her review demonstrates, it's much easier to defend torture when you distort nearly everything. UPDATE: This, I think, is the money quote: The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not...
My book review of the Oxford Companion, edited by Antonio Cassese and many others, has just been published in the new issue of the American Journal of International Law. It's a decent-sized review, almost 5,000 words, as befits a book that checks in at more than 1200 pages. I argue that the book is a magisterial achievement, one of the...
You just can't make this stuff up: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken a harsh position against undocumented Armenian workers in Turkey, threatening to expel thousands amid tensions over allegations that Armenians were victims of “genocide” during the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Resolutions passed recently in the United States and Sweden to brand the World...
Our friends at the German Yearbook have asked us to post the following call for papers, and we are happy to oblige: The German Yearbook of International Law is Germany’s oldest yearbook in the field of public international law. The GYIL is published annually by the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law at the University of Kiel and contains contributions on...
[caption id="attachment_11512" align="alignleft" width="120" caption=" "][/caption] [Michael J. Glennon is Professor of Law at The Fletcher School at Tufts University] The article addresses a question that is particularly important for the United States. The Obama Administration has begun to express a renewed interest in the International Criminal Court (ICC), after almost a decade of distance between the Court and the United States....
The wide-ranging book, which is edited by Carsten Stahn and Larissa van den Herik and published by Cambridge/TMC Asser, is well worth checking out. Here is the table of contents: Part I. The Influence of Scholars and Practitioners on the Development and Conceptualization of International Criminal Law: 1. 'Satires of circumstance': some notes on war crimes trials and irony...
At least according to Dominic Hughes, a BBC reporter who obviously can't be bothered to know what he's talking about: Perhaps not surprisingly Radovan Karadzic has been a reluctant participant in this trial. The former leader of the Bosnian Serbs has appeared just a few times, regularly boycotting the process. Apparently, "once" now qualifies as "regularly." Good job, BBC! ADDENDUM: Hughes also claims that...
Both Humblelawstudent and Stuart Taylor have criticized my previous post. Both misunderstand the federal torture statute and the concept of torture in important -- and unfortunately all too common -- ways, so it is worth explaining their errors in a separate post. Let's begin with HLS. He claims that, contrary to my assertion, "the statute requires the interrogator to actually...
David Luban and Stuart Taylor are having an interesting exchange at Balkinization over whether the CIA's use of waterboarding qualifies as torture under the federal torture statute, 18 USC 2340. Luban accuses Taylor of embracing "the fundamental trick used by the torture lawyers: pretending that the legal definition of 'torture' is something technical rather than 'colloquial'," when...
The following is a guest-post -- actually a short book-proposal -- by my friend Mark Osiel, the Aliber Family Chair in Law at the University of Iowa. I have agreed to post it despite the inordinate jealousy I feel toward his remarkable productivity. Mark would greatly appreciate comments and criticisms, especially examples and counter-examples of what he is trying to...
Sure, it's in Roman Polanski's new film, The Ghost Writer. But it's still cool -- especially when the Prime Minister, played by an excellent Pierce Brosnan, is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for aiding and abetting torture by the United States! I have to admit, I never thought I'd live to see Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute...
I am sitting in the Indianapolis airport as I write this, heading home from a conference on the Milosevic trial. The conference was easily the most enjoyable I've ever attended -- I vastly prefer small, specialized conferences to mega-events like the AALS or ASIL. The attendees were a superb mix of academics, former OTP investigators and analysts, and defence attorneys. ...
