One thing that I have long wondered about is why certain legal offices within the federal government become more political than other offices. Why, for instance, has the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice become more political, or so it seems, than the Office of Legal Advisor in the Department of State? Why have Inspector Generals...
I just finished reading and absorbing Medellin today. I mentioned the case several times in my Constitutional Law I class in the fall, and students seemed quite intrigued by the interesting fact pattern and issues presented by the case. Which leads me to the following question: Can readers think of a good place to teach Medellin in an introductory...
The series of wonderful posts on this blog about the Supreme Court’s decision in Medellin--and the energy and extent of coverage of the case even beyond this blog--remind me of an impression I have long had about legal scholarship in the United States compared to many other countries. I am reminded of something similar to what the famous sociologist...
[William Dodge is a law professor at UC Hastings] I’ve not seen anyone comment yet on what I thought was one of the more notable aspects of Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion, its application of Justice Jackson’s Youngstown analysis. The question is how to read congressional silence. Although I am greatly oversimplifying, Jackson seemed to read Congress’s failure to authorize what the...
Thank you to Roger for extending my stay guest blogging, so I could step aside for a few days for all of the interesting posts on Medellin. At the request of several readers, I will re-post my first post (which had the misfortune of being posted right before Medellin was decided), and then later today add another post on...
I wanted to jump in with a quick response to Marty's awesome post about what is, without question, the most surprising (and for me, delightful) part of the Medellin opinion: Justice Stevens' concurrence. I love this concurrence, especially because I am (to put it mildly) rarely fond of Justice Stevens' forays into foreign relations law. This is, after...
Serbia announced yesterday that it would seek an ICJ advisory opinion on the legality of Kosovo's declaration of independence. This, to me, is further evidence that the Serbs have no real ability to alter the Kosovo outcome; the plan now is just to harass from a distance and hope Kosovo falls apart on its own. In order to...
There has been an interesting debate going on at Slate.com about whether Obama is padding his resume by referring to himself as a "law professor," even though he was formally a "senior lecturer" at the University of Chicago law school. I think the debate is rather silly myself, for the reasons Tim Wu discusses here. Nevertheless, the...
In the beginning of his concurrence in Medellin, Justice Stevens reads Article 94 not to require the Texas state courts to take steps to ensure that the U.S. complys with the ICJ judgment. I disagree with his interpretation of "undertakes to comply," but he's almost convinced me that it's a close question, at least with respect to whether the...
As many have noted, the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Medellin v. Texas raises serious questions about the binding nature of United States’s treaty commitments. The Court holds as follows: “Because none of these treaty sources creates binding federal law in the absence of implementing legislation, and because it is uncontested that no such legislation exists, we conclude that...
[Mark Weisburd is the Martha M. Brandis Professor of Law at UNC Law School.] I find it difficult to read Medellin as institutionalizing a presumption against self-execution. If that had been Roberts's intent, the form of his argument should have been, "We presume non self-execution, is there anything to overcome the presumption?" Instead, he analyzed the text, ratification hearings, and practice...
[Edward Swaine is an Associate Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. ] The quick scorecard on Medellin is pretty simple: Texas wins, the ICJ loses, and the President loses. I have lots of reactions to what the opinions say about the ICJ, non-self-execution, and even comparative law, but let's just focus on this bottom line. The...
