In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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14 Nov

A team of FBI investigators has concluded that the September killings of 14 Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military contractor Blackwater violated deadly-force rules security contractors. Although the investigation is continuing, this seems to settle part of the factual dispute over the Blackwater shootings. But can Blackwater's personnel face criminal prosecution? I am not sure, actually. This is a bit...

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14 Nov

Which nation has the top brand name? It seems strange to think of the branding of nations, but upon reflection we do it all the time. When we think of a country like Australia, Iran, Switzerland or Sudan we associate certain positive or negative qualities to each nation. A recent study reveals that the nations with...

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14 Nov

As widely anticipated, Ban Ki-moon has named Serge Brammertz, a deputy prosecutor at the ICC and the head of the UN commission investigating the murder of Lebanase Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, to succeed Carla del Ponte as the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY. Brammertz will take over the position on January 1, 2008. As I discussed in September, the ICTY's...

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13 Nov

Dr. Danilo Türk, international law professor, former diplomat, and former Assistant UN Secretary General, has “decisively won Slovenia's presidential election Sunday, the electoral commission announced.” (See the AFP and the VOA reports.) Dr. Türk, an international lawyer by training, was ambassador to the UN from 1992 to 2000, making him the longest serving Slovenian ambassador abroad. According to his bio on...

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12 Nov

I recently reviewed the proposed student edits of a forthcoming article in the Notre Dame Law Review. They are doing an outstanding job, but I have one small quibble. In the process of editing, the student editors asked me for a copy of three documents that I had on file and that were cited in the article as...

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12 Nov

This past weekend was the second annual Empirical Legal Studies Conference at NYU. I had a colleague attend and he said it was an outstanding conference. Plenty of empirical research on courts, corporations, criminal law, bankruptcy, intellectual property, torts, securities, etc. But if you looked on the program for something on international law, you would come up...

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12 Nov

Surely, we can come up with a funnier list of treaties than this. Or, perhaps not. As I first noted on joining Opinio Juris, international law jokes are far and few between. Of course, given my initial foray into that arena, I'm not sure I'm well suited to changing this fact. But, perhaps some of our...

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12 Nov

I began in academia after the Iraq war began, and have been puzzled — and at times frustrated — by the lack of student attention to or interest in the war. One could spend weeks on campus at MU and never see evidence that this is a state university in a country at war. (I arrived at school...

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10 Nov

I’ve spent the last couple of days in an expert meeting on “the role of states in regulating and adjudicating the activities of corporations with respect to human rights,” hosted by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Danish section of the International Commission of Jurists. The meeting was designed to help inform John Ruggie, the Special Representative...

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10 Nov

The Leiden Journal of International Law has asked me to post the following call for papers:Special Issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law (2008) The Risks of International Law Abstracts due 1 December 2007; Complete articles by 1 April 2008 The Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL) is now soliciting articles for a special issue of the LJIL to be dedicated to...

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10 Nov

Yesterday I attended a wonderful conference on religious asylum. I was particularly impressed by the work of one of the speakers, Paul Marshall. He offered a tremendously impressive survey of religious oppression throughout the world. The bottom line is religious freedom is strongest in countries with majority Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist populations and the weakest in countries with majority...

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