We hope you never left, but in case you have not been keeping up with Opinio Juris over the holiday season, here is what you missed: 1. Two excellent blog posts setting the record straight about the NDAA, graciously provided to us by two experts on the subject, Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck. You can find Part I here and Part...
This post will seem like an extended plug for my own work, so apologies. But I wanted to offer a few thoughts on the legal issues raised by Ruti's excellent post, the politics of which -- with one exception, noted below -- I completely share. First, Ruti asks whether Libya should be able to claim the right to try to Saif...
In the comments to my previous post, I described refusing to allow comments on a blog as an "act of cowardice." Ben Wittes, one of the contributors to Lawfare, a blog that does not allow comments as a matter of policy, doesn't appreciate the description: Anyone who wants to understand why Lawfare does not take comments need only take a brief...
Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law at New York Law School and Visiting Professor at London School of Economics. She is the author of Transitional Justice (2000) and Humanity’s Law, which was published this fall by Oxford University Press. When the United Nations Security Council authorized the use of force to protect civilians in Libya, the...
My thanks to Marty and Steve for their fascinating and insightful posts (here and here) on the NDAA. I have many thoughts about the Act, but I want to focus here on the idea that U.S. courts can and should analogize to detention in international armed conflict in order to determine what it means for a person to have “substantially...
By Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck* Section 1021 of the NDAA and the Laws of War In our companion post, we explained that section 1021 of the NDAA will not have the dramatic effects that many critics have predicted--in particular, that it will not affect the unresolved question of whether the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) would authorize a...
By Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck* Editorial pages and blogs have been overrun in the past couple of weeks with analyses and speculation about the detainee provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, which the President has just signed into law. One of the major disputes concerns whether and how the NDAA might alter the status quo. In this post, we'll...
The President signed the NDAA today, and issued the following signing statement. Steve Vladeck and I will shortly post on the details of the bill -- what's bad about it; how it has been widely misconstrued to be much worse than it is, in fact; and how in at least one important respect it marks an important resolution of an...
In case the government's actions haven't yet convinced you of the fundamental unfairness of the commissions (such as making up war crimes), perhaps its decision to treat the attorney-client privilege as optional will do the trick: The new commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison wants a team of government and law enforcement officials to be allowed to review all ...
Our friends at Cambridge University have asked me to bring the following journal to readers' attention, which has been established by James Crawford: Cambridge Journal of International & Comparative Law is a newly established double-blind peer reviewed, open-access journal which aims to publish high-end legal scholarship. It has a broad focus on international and comparative law and a particular focus on...
France has turned down the ICTY's request that it detain and turn over a former ICTY spokeswoman who has been sentenced to a week in prison for contempt of that court. PARIS — France refused Monday to carry out an arrest mandate from the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal against a French journalist convicted of contempt for revealing confidential information about the...
Big things are afoot in Europe, especially as the United Kingdom inches further and further away from European institutions. The U.K.'s refusal to join the recent fiscal reform plan has gotten all the headlines, but I hadn't realized that the U.K. is also embroiled in an ongoing battle of wills with the European Court of Human Rights over that Court's order...
