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 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...
I blogged late last year about the UK Court of Appeal's judgment in Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs v. Rahmatullah, which implicitly repudiated a little-known OLC memo written by Jack Goldsmith that concluded “operatives of international terrorist organizations” are not “protected persons” for purposes of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention -- a provision that prohibits...
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...
Julian beat me to discussing Romney's statement last night that, if elected, he would “make sure that Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation" (what we ICL scholars call "direct and public incitement to genocide"). I disagree with Julian, however, that Ahmadinejad could not be prosecuted in the United States. Pursuant to the Genocide...
I've long wondered whether and when the American Law Institute (ALI) might try to update its 3rd Restatement on the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. Since its 1987 publication, the two-volume set, culled together under the leadership of Professor Lou Henkin, has had a tremendous impact. It has been a frequent resource for U.S. courts and American international...
Children and armed conflict or “CAAC” (as the unharmonious acronym goes), has become a controversial area of activity for the UN Security Council. Although the Security Council has adopted a series of important resolutions on the topic since 2005, its most recent foray into the fray led to four abstentions to Resolution 2068. Azerbaijan, China, Pakistan and Russia declined to support...
I am delighted to announce that Oxford University Press has just published a paperback edition of my book, The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. The paperback is priced at a very reasonable £25 -- £45 cheaper than the hardback. Here again is the description: This book provides the first comprehensive legal analysis of the twelve war...
I want to call readers' attention to an excellent new article by James Stewart (UBC; currently a Global Hauser Fellow at NYU) that is forthcoming in the Journal of International Criminal Justice. Here is the abstract of the article, entitled "Overdetermined Atrocities": An event is overdetermined if there are multiple sufficient causes for its occurrence. A firing squad is a classic...
Jack Goldsmith offers five thoughts today at Lawfare about the D.C. Circuit's Hamdan II decision. I agree with two of his thoughts -- that the government is free to rely in future prosecutions on alternatives to material support (MST) such as aiding and abetting terrorism, and that (sadly) al-Bahlul could be detained indefinitely if he is ultimately acquitted by his...
The media and blogosphere are predictably -- and justifiably -- abuzz about Candy Crowley pointing out that Romney was wrong when he claimed it took Obama two weeks to label the Benghazi attack an "act of terror." More interesting, though, is the push-back from Romney surrogates like Ed Gillespie, who said afterward that "[s]he was wrong about it, no doubt...
Apologies for interrupting the book discussion, but I wanted to flag the D.C. Circuit's blockbuster opinion in Hamdan v. United States, which was issued today. The D.C. Circuit has reversed the Court of Military Commission Review and held that material support for terrorism was not a war crime when Hamdan committed the acts for which he was convicted. Here are...
