For a while there, it looked as if there might be a real fight over Harold Koh's nomination as State Department Legal Adviser. The Republicans have been casting about for a nomination that they could defeat on some issue of principle (that is, over something not involving a nominee's tax returns), along the lines of Lani Guinier's failed nomination...
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a provocative essay by Brian Weeden critiquing the idea that the U.S. should sign on to a treaty banning the weaponization of space. The author's point is not so much that he thinks there should be unregulated military use of space, but rather whether a treaty is the best way to go about...
In case you haven't seen them already, I wanted to point out that Beth Van Schaack and Hari Osofsky have a couple of posts at IntLawGrrls on yesterday's Koh confirmation hearing....
The Eleventh Circuit earlier this month ruled that Manuel Noriega could be extradited to France following the completion of his sentence in Florida. In Noriega v. Pastrana, Noriega argued that under the Third Geneva Convention he was entitled to automatic and immediate repatriation to Panama as soon as his criminal sentence was complete. However, Section 5 of the...
Is that even possible these days? It seems not, but the Federalist Society is sure doing a nice job in lining up Andrew McCarthy, Scott Horton, Douglas Kmiec, David Luban, Bart DePalma and Steve Vladeck to debate the recent release of the CIA interrogation memos and their content. No one has yet denounced the other in ad hominem attacks and there...
No sooner had I read Peter's thought-provoking post about transparency in arbitration than I received a link to a complete webcast of this month's arbitration before the Permanent Court of Arbitration between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement/Army over the Abyei region. This appears to be the first videotape/webcast of an arbitration between a state and...
Dave Kopel has a post today at The Volokh Conspiracy in which he dusts off John Yoo's argument in the infamous 14 March 2003 memo that a CIA interrogator prosecuted for torture would be able to invoke the defenses of necessity and self-defense. I am not interested in responding to Kopel's post, which grossly mischaracterizes my position on torture prosecutions...
The National Court has reassigned the case from Judge Garzon to Judge Eloy Velasco. CNN says that "Judge Velasco is thought to have little, if any, experience in these kinds of cases." Apparently, CNN has never heard of The Google, because it took me about 30 seconds to learn that, in January, Judge Velasco relied on Spain's universal jurisdiction law...
Chris Borgen and I have an op-ed in today's Philadelphia Inquirer -- you can access it here -- defending Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh's nomination to serve as the Legal Adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Our inspiration for writing it was Rick Santorum's recent column, which suggested Harold Koh was un-American, and launched a general attack on international law having any...
For a fascinating google-map of individual cases identified swine-flu occurrences, see here. (Can't vouch for its accuracy, however, and as H/T Futurepundit points out, it will rapidly get overwhelmed as more cases become identified over time.) Among the interviews I participated in as one of the experts on the Gingrich-Mitchell UN reform commission back in 2005 was one with a senior...
Despite his checkered past, I'm beginning to like Jacob Zuma, who is set to become the next President of South Africa, more and more: The Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir will not be invited to the inauguration ceremony of the South African president-elect Jacob Zuma, according to news reports. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) headed by Zuma has an absolute majority...
State Department Legal Adviser nominee Harold Koh's written answers to pre-hearing questions asked by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have been posted online at Senator Lugar's site. The Q&A goes for over 60 pages. I have only skimmed it and so, for now, I will simply point out questions/answers that may be of particular interest to Opinio Juris readers (and of course, I...
