[Roger S. Clark is the Board of Governors Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School.] Several important themes are developed alongside one another in Gregory Gordon’s remarkable book on the activity for which he coins the term “atrocity speech law.” They are captured largely in his sub-title “Foundation, Fragmentation and Fruition” and in his summary of the “fruition” points at pp....
[Gregory Gordon is Associate Professor of Law, Associate Dean for Development and External Affairs and Director of the Research Postgraduates Programme at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. He was formerly a prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations.] I have always felt that great scholarship is born...
Over the next three days we will have an online discussion concerning Gregory Gordon’s new book Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition (Oxford 2017). We welcome Professor Gordon (The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law), as well as Roger Clark (Rutgers Law), Mark Drumbl (Washington and Lee School of Law), and David Simon (Yale Dept. of Political Science), who...
I have filed an amicus brief in the Al Bahlul case. Al Bahlul was charged and convicted before a military commission for multiple offenses including conspiracy. On appeal, several of the charges were thrown out, but the conspiracy conviction remains and is the subject of his cert petition before the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the government once held the position...
Waiver of immunity is at the center of another cholera case against the UN, this time in the Eastern District of New York. In LaVenture et al v. United Nations, the plaintiffs argue that they have two distinct questions on waiver that distinguish this litigation from the recent decision upholding the UN's absolute immunity in Georges et al. The questions...
Cross-posted at Balkinization If, as I argued earlier this week, the 2001 AUMF passed by Congress cannot be read to authorize the growing set of U.S. military actions against Syrian and Iranian forces in Syria, does the President’s Article II power standing alone support these strikes? The best articulated argument I’ve seen that the President has the Article II power to...
As many readers are probably aware, the ACLU is currently bringing an ATS action against the two psychologists, James Mitchell and John Jessen, who allegedly designed and administered the CIA's torture program. Here is the ACLU's summary of the case, Salim v. Mitchell: The CIA paid the two men and the company they later formed tens of millions of dollars over the...
Cross-posted at Balkinization Because it’s too easy for our growing war in Syria to get lost amidst other also-pressing news, I want to be sure to note that last week ended with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee formally requesting the Trump Administration’s legal justification for a growing set of clashes between the U.S. military and armed forces allied with Syrian President...
When last we met William Bradford, he had just published an article in the National Security Law Journal (NSLJ) accusing centrist national-security-law professors of treason and advocating prosecuting them for providing material support to terrorists. After many scholars, including me, pointed out that the article was both absurd and deeply offensive, the NSLJ repudiated the article. (Alas, the journal has since scrubbed the...
One of the most basic assumption of ICL is that an act cannot be a war crime unless it violates a rule of international humanitarian law (IHL). Article 6(b) of the London Charter criminalised "War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war." Article 3 of the ICTY Statute provides that "[t]he International Tribunal shall have the power to prosecute...
I've got a new draft article up on SSRN (you can download it here) entitled China and the U.S. Strategic Construction of Cybernorms: the Process is the Product. It was written for a really great inter-disciplinary workshop held at Stanford Law School earlier this Spring by the Hoover Institution's National Security, Technology and Law Working Group (which is chaired by...
Longtime readers of this blog may have noticed that one of my pet peeves is the incorrect usage of international legal terms in public and diplomatic discourse. Hence, Israel did NOT commit "piracy" during the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid despite lots of governments claiming otherwise. Cuba is not under a "blockade" despite tons of Cuban government propaganda otherwise. So you can imagine my...
