The Ninth Circuit recently issued an opinion in United States v. Smiskin interpreting a treaty with a certain Indian tribe that included an unusual reference to rules of treaty interpretation. The case involved a potential conflict between a treaty right and a statutory prohibition on transporting "unstamped cigarettes" (i.e., untaxed cigarettes). The Yakama Treaty of 1855 guarantees the following...
I've just finished reading Tom Bowers' fascinating — and disturbing — book on the failures of denazification after WWII, Blind Eye to Murder. In the final chapter, Bowers discusses the 1977 kidnapping and eventual murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the wealthy president of the Federation of German Employers and a former SS officer, by the Red Army Faction (RAF). ...
International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers. Not exactly Memorial Day -- not yet, at least. Today, cultural sites; tomorrow, our federal holidays. Can the black helicopters and global income taxes be far behind? For those of you who want to start your vacation planning, here's the new calendar. ...
The World Bank has a wonderful website called Doing Business that tracks the ease of doing business throughout the world. There is a tremendous amount of useful information that is worth perusing. For example, the top ten easiest places to do business in the world are Singapore, New Zealand, United States, Canada, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Denmark,...
We’re regularly plugging international law conferences here at Opinio Juris. Most of them, however, are in the United States. So, for a change of pace, I want to call attention to any of our readers in Israel of a conference there next week, entitled “Forty Years after 1967: Reappraising the Role and Limits of Legal Discourse on...
Here is the Amazon pre-order page for "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration," due out in September. According to the publicity material, the book promises to "show why Bush's apparent indifference to human rights has damaged his presidency and, perhaps, his standing in history." Is sovereigntism losing another of its leading exponents? This...
Last week, I discussed the disturbing case of Francois Xavier-Byuma, a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group who had been arrested and accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide. As I noted in that post, the accusations were leveled by a gacaca judge whom Byuma had been investigating in connection with the rape of a young girl. The situation...
The United Nations announced last week that the government of Burundi has agreed to establish a criminal tribunal and truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) to deal with the widespread war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide committed during Burundi's 12-year civil war, in which more than 300,000 people were killed:Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights,...
The Economic Mobility Project has released a fascinating and disturbing report entitled "Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?" The entire report is well worth a read, but what I found particularly striking was how poorly the U.S. does in terms of economic mobility relative to other developed Western countries, particularly the much-maligned ones in Scandinavia: The report...
On behalf of the regular contributors here at Opinio Juris, I wanted to welcome (and introduce) our first two interns who will be helping out around here (in the virtual sense) over the summer. Brianne Draffin is a rising 3L at Case Western Reserve School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio where she is the Symposium Editor of the Journal...
The Council on Foreign Relations has launched Campaign 2008, which is "engineered to track the campaign through the prism of foreign policy, trade, international economics, and national and homeland security issues...
Interesting exchange kicked off by Einer Elhauge over at VC (here), with responses from Larry Tribe, Jack Balkin, and Orin Kerr (here, here, and here), among others, the basic line of which is that doctrinalism will get you nowhere in the legal academy these days. The disagreement has been mostly about what qualifies as doctrinalism, and whether this isn't...
