Sundays are a bit slow around OJ, so I thought I might offer (unless my confreres think it too far off topic) a series of indeterminate run, Sundays with Stendhal, featuring quotes from various works of the master. Stendhal was a diplomat in much of his career, a figure of a transborder European elite culture, and is also a figure...
Take five minutes out of your busy day and watch this interview, which would be hysterical if it was a Saturday Night Live send-up of an interview by a conservative newscaster, but is just sad because it's real. Notice how little the interviewer -- who is clearly animatronic and programmed by Powerline and Hugh Hewitt -- knows about "socialism" and...
Over at the excellent polls/politics site FiveThirtyEight, Sean Quinn describes an Obama volunteer working doors in Virginia: Back in Charlottesville, we encountered Alex Englehard, a German from Heidelberg pursuing his legal degree and on break after his fifth-year exams. Englehard, a dedicated full-time Obama volunteer, said many Americans "don't realize how big an impact this one election has on the rest of...
Of course law school associate deans and admissions people are focused on the internals of this data, but even in the midst of crashing law school endowments, lowered giving, and so on, can we assume at least that law school itself is counter-cyclical to the economy overall? When the economy tanks, students and recent grads take refuge in professional schools?...
Last week the ICJ issued an order for provisional measures (pdf is here) in the Case Concerning Application of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Georgia v. Russian Federation) . This case, along with the recent referral to the ICJ for an advisory opinion on the status of Kosovo, are the latest cases arising out of...
Today, Friday, October 24, is United Nations Day. If you are in the United States, however, your reaction is more likely to be - huh? What United Nations Day? This is not a feature of a right-wing blackout to prevent takeover by the 'black helicopters' - neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post (I checked the paper copies,...
In a sign of increasing election-eve desperation on the Right, respectable Republicans (Andrew McCarthy, for one) appear now to be taking seriously the argument that Obama does not meet constitutional eligibility requirements for the presidency. A suit has been filed in Pennsylvania seeking declarative relief to that effect, on two grounds: 1) he was born not in Hawaii but...
One further side note to the discussion of Roger's article in Virginia journal on Nobel Prize winners ...
I'm just back from 9 days in Madrid -- my first visit, and it was great. Of course, while there I couldn't ignore the international law-related story of the day. Judge Baltasar Garzón (of Pinochet, al Qaeda, and Eta fame) is at it again. This time he's agreed to open a criminal investigation into thousands of disappearances and executions surrounding...
It appears that there may have been some progress regarding the Prosecutor's ability to disclose the potentially exculpatory information to the defense -- progress that is not reflected in yesterday's decision. According to a recent motion, the Prosecutor has received permission to turn over all of the disputed documents to the Trial Chamber in unredacted form, so that the judges...
One of the most important Alien Tort Statute cases has begun in California that will test the scope of corporate liability under international law. The facts are hotly disputed but either version is truly bizarre. Over 100 Nigerians seize a Chevron oil platform on May 25, 1998. Plaintiffs argue that it was a peaceful nonviolent act of...
I have been a big fan of Andrew Sullivan's writing for a couple of decades (since his TNR days), and have read his blog pretty regularly for the past four years. He has an interesting essay up at The Atlantic's newly redesigned site, "Why I Blog." From the intro: This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely...
