In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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01 Sep

Turns out (along with who knows what else) that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, active enough to have attended its statewide convention in 1994. The party argues that Alaska's accession by referendum in 1958 violated international law, insofar as voters were not given the choice of independence in addition to the ballot options of statehood or continued status...

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31 Aug

There’s so much domestic news these days it would’ve been easy to miss Eric Lichtblau’s story in yesterday’s New York Times about legislation introduced in Congress just before the August recess that would substantially define the scope of the United States’ war with Al Qaeda, et al. Indeed, it’s not clear why the Times itself finally just realized the significance...

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31 Aug

... and hoping that the damage is minimal and that everyone is safe, including any OJ readers.  Watching the television today caused me to recall a conference I attended a few years ago, a meeting of humanitarian disaster professionals who dealt with developing world disasters ranging from natural disasters to conflict relief.  At one session, on natural disasters and, as...

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30 Aug

My blogging has slowed down the past couple of weeks, because I've been traveling and finishing a book chapter that criticizes Moreno-Ocampo's approach to deciding which situations to investigate.  (See my previous post.)  But I would be remiss if I did not mention this interesting piece of news -- the Fifth Circuit has reversed the district court's dismissal of the...

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30 Aug

The Guardian seems to think so: A coalition of human rights lawyers, academics and leading non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has begun openly to criticise the competence and conduct of the prosecutor of the international criminal court, the Argentinian Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Their concerns follow his announcement last month that it is to seek an arrest warrant for genocide against the Sudanese president, and...

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29 Aug

The blog Futurismic as an interesting post on "viral sovereignty." According to a recent Washington Post op-ed by Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett:  This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations — even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat...

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25 Aug

Some hard-working soul on the Democratic vice presidential vetting team had to make her way through a law review article Joe Biden co-authored in the late 1980's on constitutional war powers. The piece is pretty safe stuff, advocating a "joint decision model" for use-of-force decisionmaking. In the course of proposing some tinkering with the War Powers Resolution, there is this...

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24 Aug

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my experiences in Georgia in the early 1990s, monitoring the various conflicts - Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the then-Georgian civil war in Tbilisi.  I noted that those secessionist conflicts were marked on each side by ethnic cleansing as extreme as anything I saw in the Yugloslav wars (a country which I also...

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23 Aug

This year, I am watching the Olympic Games on television in the United States for the first time since the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. It has been my singular honor to have been selected to be an arbitrator on the ad hoc Division of the Court of Arbitration for Sport at the last four Olympic Games. Serving on...

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23 Aug

(First, before anything else, a welcome to Eric Posner back to the blogosphere, lately of Slate's Convictions (in the same shutdown that gave OJ the welcome opportunity to snag Deborah Pearlstein) and now of Volokh Conspiracy, where Eric has been posting particularly related to the resurgence of Russia.) I have been writing in my own draft work this summer about the...

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21 Aug

     Franck Fife/AFP via MSNBC    As we've learned from our expert guest-bloggers, there are disputes arising out of the Olympics, and then there are DISPUTES.   The reported International Olympic Committee investigation into the age of Chinese gymnast and gold medalist He Kexin （何可欣） qualifies as the type of DISPUTE that could really get ugly. Why? Because a big part of the investigation...

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