I've just posted a piece I did for Peggy's (great) Missouri v. Holland conference last year, entitled The Elusive Foreign Compact. Granted I'm weeks (if not months) behind other participants in getting my contribution posted (see, e.g., here and here). Hopefully, however, this is a case of better late than never. For those who might be interested, here's the abstract: This symposium essay identifies...
Steve Charnovitz has this interesting post at the IELP Blog about a joint statement on the swine A(H1N1) flu virus issued by the FAO, WHO, WTO, and OIE (extra credit to those of you already on to the last one: the World Organization for Animal Health). Steve quite plausibly challenges the WTO's authority to make this kind of pronouncement as...
Invoking the legacy of Nuremberg, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) came out yesterday in support of prosecuting members of the Bush administration responsible for waterboarding. His position on prosecutions is interesting in its own right, but I want to use his comments for a different purpose -- to plug a collection of letters that his father, Thomas Dodd, wrote to his...
The "beautiful game" is what Pele calls soccer (yes, I know, "football" to the rest of the world besides the US). On April 25th, diplomats from the UN, including the Secretary-General, set aside the great game of diplomacy to play a game of soccer at New York's Chelsea Piers to support the non-governmental organization Play31. Play31's website explains that: Play31 was...
It has gone all but unnoticed in the U.S. but Russia has declared victory in its fight against Chechen rebels. Chechnya had become a byword for a place of chaos and random violence perpetrated by all sides, especially since the first Chechen War of 1994-1996. But a recent report by the Times of London concerning Russian black operations in the...
William Ranney Levi's paper on interrogation techniques, Interrogation's Law, is forthcoming in Yale Law Journal, but is up at SSRN. Here is the abstract: Conventional wisdom states that recent U.S. authorization of coercive interrogation techniques, and the legal decisions that sanctioned them, constitute a dramatic break with the past. This is false. U.S. interrogation policy well prior to 9/11 has allowed...
University of Iowa law professor Mark Osiel - an old friend of mine and someone well known to many of us, particularly for his books and writing on mass atrocities - has a new book out, The End of Reciprocity: Terror, Torture, and the Law of War (Cambridge 2009). I've read it at pretty high speed - looking for some...
Congratulations to Ed Swaine and Sean Murphy for yesterday's Potomac Roundtable on foreign relations law at GW. It was a terrific meeting, with excellent papers from Kristina Daugirdas, Louis Fisher, and Ed Swaine - topics ranging from FSIA to war powers to Youngstown. I learned a lot - Duncan was also in attendance from Philly - and it was great...
I imagine many readers have by now seen this story in the New York Times (and Julian beats me to it!) reporting that the Obama administration appears ready to return to military commissions for trying at least some Guantamo detainees: Officials who work on the Guantánamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying...
So I'm not exactly surprised that Obama is planning to revive the use of military commissions to try terror suspects, (according to the NYT). The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself. No doubt there will be some amendment to the Bush commissions,...
The conventional wisdom is probably correct here, that David Souter's retirement won't make much of a difference to the Court's overall balance. But no two Justices are alike. There will be inevitable differences in style and approach, and on the less prominent questions, the ones mostly off the radar screen, that can lead to different votes. I don't know much...
[ Laura Dickinson is Foundation Professor of Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.] It seems that in some quarters, support for international law (combined with a little bit of humor) is enough to get one labeled “so out there” to be unqualified for government service. A few commentators on the right have recently decided to attack international...
