In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Topics

21 May

1 In my last post about battlefield robots, I quickly breezed through the ethical and legal priors that technology would go through before reaching the fundamental issues of autonomous battlefield robots - autonomy in decisionmaking in the use of weapons on the battlefield. Leaving aside the questions of exactly how that can be achieved as a matter of actual program...

|
21 May

The Root over at Slate ran this piece on Monday about fistula and its devastating impact on the lives and health of women in the developing world: How can it be, in this day and age, that 500,000 women a year die in childbirth? But it's true. The World Health Organization estimates that 1,600 women die every day from...

|
21 May

Now that the hiring season is over, I wanted to invite our readers to send me an email with any information regarding new and lateral international law professor hires. When you email me please include in the subject line "Law Professor Hires." A fairly comprehensive list of all 2008 entry-level hires is here and a fairly comprehensive list of all...

|
20 May

Over at National Security Advisors, our colleague Dave Glazier has a superb post on whether the Gitmo defense attorneys are responsible for the ills of the military commissions, as the Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page seems to believe. Here's the intro:The Wall Street Journal published a scathing editorial today blasting the military and civilian defense attorneys it portrays...

|
20 May

The June 2008 issue of Esquire magazine has a feature piece on John Yoo by John H. Richardson, plus an on-line transcript of part of Richardson's interview and an autobiographical sketch by Yoo himself. Although framed as a cautionary tale, the article clearly seeks to humanize Yoo. The reader gets a view of Yoo the professor, questioning...

|
20 May

Many of us who work in the areas of laws of war and armed conflict have been watching the development of technology because, if history is any guide, changes in technology are a big, quite possibly the biggest, long-term, historical driver of changes in the laws of war. The development of the musket, cross-bow, airplane, machine gun, and so...

|
20 May

What happens if a mother wrongfully removes a child from his habitual residence because of fears that the child will be abused by his father? In such circumstances can the mother flee the country with the child consistent with the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (HCCAICA). Those are the questions raised by the...

|
19 May

Any American who has ever watched the British Commons debates on TV cannot help sighing in embarrassment and shame at the sheer inarticulateness of our American counterparts in the House and Senate. Wit and intelligence are not even at issue; successfully stringing together a subject and predicate, and to do so in less than a quarter hour, is. ...

|
19 May

They number at least 12,000,000, though a precise count is impossible because many governments refuse to consider them a legitimate category for census purposes. They suffer serious and widespread employment discrimination, especially their women, leading to unemployment rates often 6-8 times greater than the countries in which they live. They are sequestered in dangerous, environmentally-degraded slums,...

|
19 May

Russia continues to keep the pressure on Canada in the race to claim rights over the seabed underneath the Arctic Sea. THE battle for "ownership" of polar oil reserves has intensified with Russia sending a fleet of nuclear-powered ice-breakers into the Arctic. It has reinforced fears that Moscow intends to unlawfully annex a vast portion of the ice-covered...

|
18 May

Ken's already up on the boards below, but I just wanted to add our official welcome to him for the coming week as a guest blogger. I'm confident that Ken is known to most of you for his always engaging and provocative scholarship as well as his eclectic blogging on Law of War and Just War Theory Blog (where...

|