(Please note that a commenter has rightly corrected me on two points, which I correct below) Former State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger (and former OJ guest blogger) spoke today at Hofstra's biennial Legal Ethics Conference. His talk was typically engaging, honest, and interesting (it will not be news to many of our readers that Bellinger was an internal dissenter on...
Martin Holterman and Marko Milanovic have been kind enough to respond to my post on the ICTY's attack on Dr. Karadzic's right of self-representation, so it's only fair that I respond to their responses. To begin with, Martin writes that "[g]iven the precedent of the Milosevic case, and undoubtedly many others with which I am less familiar, I think we can...
The Obama Administration is becoming famous for their Friday night news dumps (deficit reports are always on Fridays). So here is another one sure to anger some parts of their base, but which is carefully buried while everyone is watching the Yankees beat up on the Angels. The Obama administration has formulated a new policy for Sudan that proposes working with that country’s...
Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith have a nice piece in Green Bag on foreign sovereign immunity as applied to current and former government officials. The article tees up the issues that will be presented in Samantar v. Yousef. Here is a key part of their argument: We agree with those courts that have concluded that suits against individual foreign...
Harvard Law School is hosting in a couple of week what is certain to be a very interesting small conference on the Alien Tort Statute. I was lucky enough to be one of the invitees, addressing the issue of corporate liability under the ATS. I address the issue of corporate liability under the ATS, but am actually interested in it...
The Washington Post reports that a prominent Democratic fundraiser and close ally of Senator John Kerry (chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) is seeking to be permitted to lobby on behalf of the current Sudanese government. This may seem a little weird, and even morally distasteful, but it is another logical consequence of the engagement strategy. As the hopeful...
I have no expertise in this area, so I'm not going to opine on the legality of Zelaya's ouster. Two things, however, are worth noting. First, the report that Julian mentions was not written by the Congressional Research Service -- a mistake that others on the right have made. It was written by the Law Library of Congress. Second, the...
This video from Anne Bayefsky of the Human Rights Council meetings on the Goldstone Report is fascinating (though I am not on board with her over-the-top attack on Goldstone personally). But note the indiscriminate and deeply hypocritical use of the words "genocide," "war crimes," and "crimes against humanity" by the least morally attractive member states of the HRC (How...
Assuming that the other Circuits follow suit, Roger is almost certainly right that the Second Circuit's recent decision in Talisman Energy "will be the death knell for most corporate liability claims under the Alien Tort Statute." That's regrettable in itself. What's particularly regrettable, though, is that the Second Circuit still has no idea what it's talking about when it comes...
I just wanted to note that I have posted to SSRN The Language of Law and the Practice of Politics: Great Powers and the Rhetoric of Self-Determination in the Cases of Kosovo and South Ossetia, which is part of the special issue of the Chicago Journal of International Law about great power politics to which Ken has referred a couple of times....
Another classic by the Sudanese government: Ismail also accused Israel of being behind aggravation and continuation of the Darfur crisis, saying "a group of Darfurians have recently admitted that they have provided the International Criminal Court (ICC) with false evidences, which support our assurances that there are Zionist trends behind aggravation of the Darfur crisis and undermining of the stability in...
When I wrote my critique of the Jerusalem Post editorial on the ICC, I also sent a short letter to the editor pointing out the editorial's basic factual errors. It was a very straightforward letter -- no politics, just indisputably true facts such as that the ICTY and the ICC are different institutions. It's been more than a week, and the...
