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...
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...
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...
I have bumped Dave's comment to the main page, because it's worth a read -- and not just because it supports my claim that Khadr will serve no more than two years in a Canadian prison...
One of the most significant questions under GATT Article XX is whether States can violate WTO rules in order to protect against foreign harms. It is an issue that has plagued the GATT/WTO for almost twenty years, most famously in the Tuna-Dolphin and US--Shrimp cases. If, for example, Article XX(b) allows departures from WTO rules "to protect human,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Last week I had the privilege to attend an investment arbitration conference and FDI moot court competition at Pepperdine. Kudos to Murdoch University of Australia for winning the competition and my alma mater NYU for winning the highest overall ranking. There was much to ponder in the conference from the likes of Andrea Bjorkland, Todd Weiler, Anna Joubin-Bret...
I wanted to let readers know that I am no longer associated with the Karadzic defense team, either formally or informally. Being involved in the case was a remarkable experience, one that I will always value. I wish the defense team well -- and more importantly, I wish Dr. Karadzic a fair trial....
Omar Khadr accepted a plea deal yesterday that called for him to plead guilty to all of the charges against him in exchange for serving one more year at Gitmo and then being repatriated to Canada to serve another seven years in prison. Predictably, the government is claiming that the guilty plea is proof that Khadr is factually guilty; as...
