In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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05 Nov

A few days ago, Roger (and others) discussed the possibility of legal challenges to Oklahoma's constitutional amendment prohibiting its judges from considering international and Sharia law.  I have my own questions about the amendment under the Supremacy Clause beyond the more obvious arguments that Oklahoma Courts must apply treaties that fall within Article VI's ambit (putting aside for now debates over whether non-self-execution limits...

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04 Nov

A couple of weeks ago, New Stream Dream accused me of never believing individuals who -- like Khadr and Lynne Stewart -- confess to committing crimes.  Well, I believe this confession: In his book, titled "Decision Points," Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about...

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03 Nov

The following is a guest post by David Glazier, an Associate Professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. As Opinio Juris readers likely recall, there are two ongoing federal prosecutions in Norfolk, Virginia before different judges of Somali pirates who made the boneheaded mistakes of attempting attacks on two separate U.S. Navy warships. (Hey, it was dark!)  In the first...

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03 Nov

At least the war criminal lost: The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja. The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons. Pantano ordered the two men to search the car...

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03 Nov

Yesterday voters in Oklahoma voted overwhelmingly (70% in favor to 30% against) to ban the use of international law and Sharia law in state courts. It appears that the referendum will be headed to the courts for review, for as my colleague Michael Helfand has noted, the ban on Sharia law may well be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The...

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03 Nov

What does the change of power in the U.S. Congress (at least in the House) mean for U.S. attitudes toward international law and foreign policy?  Not much, I think, since I think foreign policy is one of the few areas where we can imagine the new more conservative Republicans and President Obama working together better than he did with progressive...

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01 Nov

This according to AP: The sentence was handed down Sunday under a plea bargain in which the young Canadian admitted to five war crimes charges, including killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Under the deal, the judge was limited to the eight-year sentence and had to ignore the recommendation of a military jury that Khadr serve 40...

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31 Oct

Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski and Ben Wittes -- whom, for the record, I consider a friend -- have been having an interesting and useful dialogue about targeted killing.  Here is how Malinowski lays out HRW's position: Our position on targeted killing is that its use can be legally justified so long as it is limited to situations involving a...

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29 Oct

I spent the day at Georgetown University Law Center, at a seminar put on by Georgetown and the Queen's University Belfast School of Law, on Professor Vicki Jackson's splendid new book, Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era.  Fabulous small discussion seminar with comparative constitutional law scholars from around the planet, and a fine discussion of the book.  This book partly...

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29 Oct

William Gibson (appropriating Gertrude Stein's bon mot about Oakland, California) said of cyberspace: "there is no there, there."  While this captured the feeling of Gibson's fictional cyberpunk protagonists, it obscures all the physical "theres" that make cyberspace possible.  A student post at Infranet Lab called Re-Link:The Physical Network of Data is a quick visual primer on all the stuff of cyberspace...

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