Following up on Ken's post (whose views I totally endorse, by the way), I wanted to flag one UN budgetary issue of particular interest to our readers. As the NYT article details, UN budget negotiators will battle over whether each of the ICJ's 15 judges should have a law clerk. They currently share nine. Former ICJ President Roslyn Higgins made an...
The New York Times reports on budget season at the UN and various battles hotting up. It's a good piece by Neil MacFarquhar, dated November 7, 2009. As the article says, that fact that it costs the United Nations an average of $2,473 per page to create every single document in its six official languages, while outside contractors complete the same...
Both Martin Holterman and Sasha Greenawalt have questioned my repeated -- and quite deliberate -- insistence that "no competent barrister will accept appointment as stand-by counsel under these circumstances," and that any barrister who does accept the appointment will thus "be interested in one thing and one thing only: the free publicity that comes with it." Martin's comment is the...
I'm slightly embarrassed to interrupt the flow of the serious academic discussion underway, but I found this a fascinating site. MarineTraffic.com, with a live GoogleEarth map of marine shipping worldwide. This distracted me for half an hour when I was supposed to be re-writing a chapter called ...
I would like to thank Kathy Stone for commenting on my Article and agreeing to participate in this symposium. She has sharply characterized the main arguments of my paper and made two very helpful criticisms. Both of these are great prods for future work. Let me respond to each of these suggestions in turn. Stone is right that I devoted most...
[Daniel Bodansky, University of Georgia School of Law and OJ guest blogger, sends this second dispatch on the state of the Climate Change talks leading up to the Copenhagen Conference. Professor Bodansky will also be blogging from Copenhagen here at Opinio Juris in December.] This week, the chair of the negotiations and the executive secretary of the UN climate change...
[Katherine V. Stone is a Professor at UCLA School of Law] In Labor Flexibility, Legal Reform and Economic Development, Alvaro Santos presents an analysis and critique of the World Bank's Doing Business indicators for labor regulation. Those indicators have been used to promote an agenda of legal reform dedicated to eliminating worker protections and rights throughout the developing world. Santos presents...
The depths to which the extreme right will sink to oppose offering quality healthcare to all Americans really knows no bounds: Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. P.S. In case you can't read the sign on your computer, it reads “National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany – 1945.”...
Compare the following. First, Reed Stevenson for Reuters: Yugoslavia tribunal judges ordered legal counsel for former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and adjourned his trial until March 2010 to give the new defence lawyers time to prepare. Karadzic has been acting as his own attorney and has been boycotting the trial which charges him with some of Europe's worst atrocities since World...
[Professor James Gathii, provides this timely insta-background on today's decision by the the ICC prosecutor to open an investigation into the 2007 post-election violence in Kenya. Professor Gaathi teaches at Albany Law School, where he is the Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship and Governor George E. Pataki Professor of International Commercial Law. He publishes extensively on legal developments in...
As most readers probably know by now, the Trial Chamber has decided to adjourn Dr. Karadzic's trial until 1 March 2010 and appoint stand-by counsel who will step in if, at that time, Dr. Karadzic continues to boycott the trial. Here are the relevant paragraphs from the decision: 19. On the issue of continuing the trial in the absence of the...
