Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and a number of other former U.S. Department of Justice officials filed an amicus brief yesterday in Al-Marri v. Wright, a case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (see the WPost article here). As a legal argument, the amicus brief offers little that is new or surprising. It...
As a number of critics of the U.N. reform process argued last year, the much-ballyhooed new United Nations Human Rights Council was unlikely to improve upon its much-derided predecessor. Those critics have been largely proven right by the Human Rights Council's performance thus far. Steadfastly one-sided and relentlessly obsessed with Israel, the Council has failed to build any...
Washington & Lee Law Library has just updated their law journal rankings. Here is their 2006 list of the top twenty-five comparative and international law journals based on total journal and case cite counts. (You get a different result if you include "impact factor" into the mix.) 1 American Journal of International Law 2 Tulane Law Review 3...
I noted a couple of weeks ago that the Iraqi High Tribunal's failure to release the written verdict at the same time that it announced Saddam's conviction was strong evidence that, despite my earlier skepticism, the announcement was timed to influence the U.S. elections. Well, the written verdict still has not been publicly released — making the inference of...
In my last post, I used Medellin as a lens to examine the role that judicial decisions play in charting the course of international law, suggesting that Vienna Convention rights may now be enshrined in ways that are impervious to any particular judicial decision. My point was not that the judiciary is insignificant – my point was simply that...
The logical conclusion of Chertoff, Gonzales, et al.'s reactionary hostility to international law?This is where we've arrived in this country: You have the constitutional right to burn an American flag, but you can get into trouble for simply flying a foreign one. At least you can in the 30,000-person town of Pahrump, Nevada, which is close to Las Vegas and even...
To further the discussion regarding Michael Chertoff's provocative speech last week, I wanted to identify one area where a strong argument could be made for the need for greater diversity of viewpoint on developing international norms. Consider the issue of the precautionary principle. There are numerous avenues to pursue this question, and there are fundamental principles at stake...
There is almost nothing in the media or the blogosphere about this story, but reportedly Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff spoke at the Federalist Society this week and was sharply critical of current trends in international law. Reuters reports that Chertoff said that "International law is being used as a rhetorical weapon against us" and that "What we see...
I don't like John McCain, and I never fail to be amused by the media's willingness to portray him as a moderate. Still, compared to Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) -- who yesterday described a UN session on climate change as "brainwashing" -- McCain's willingness to criticize the Bush administration for stonewalling Congress about the reality of global warming is...
The member-states of the UN elected the membership of the International Law Commission yesterday. For the first time since the founding of the ILC in 1947, the United States does not have a national sitting on the Commission. This is bad for U.S. diplomacy and it may be indicative of the shifting sands of power at the UN. The...
Here's video of State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger's talk earlier this week inaugurating Duke's international law center. It's a broadly sweeping effort to justify the Bush Administration's posture to international law as one that isn't antagonistic. A primary theme: most of our differences with the Europeans in particular are policy differences, not legal ones. One thing...
Yesterday the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved a deal to provide U.S. cooperation with India in the development of a civilian nuclear program (the vote was 85-12). The House approved similar legislation earlier this year by fairly huge margins as well so final passage is likely relatively soon. I have two observations. First, this deal no doubt reflects the importance...
