In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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26 Oct

The Rwandan government has established a commission to investigate France's possible responsibility in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. That commission heard testimony this week (see reports here and here). There are some pretty ugly allegations. The French soldiers established several communes in the former Gikongoro province, now Southern Province, on their arrival to what they called Operation Turquoise, MP Desire...

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26 Oct

In case you haven’t seen this otherwise, here is a report from the Christian Science Monitor about Vice-President Cheney’s defense of waterboarding where he refers to it as a “no-brainer.” I wonder how John McCain is feeling now. The Monitor quotes at length from McClatchy:In the interview on Tuesday, Scott Hennen of WDAY Radio in Fargo, N.D., told...

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26 Oct

President Bush signed a bill yesterday authorizing the construction of a 700 mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. The fence, of course, is very controversial, opposed not only by Mexico -- outgoing President Vicente Fox has called it "shameful" and likened it to the Berlin wall -- but also by the national union representing Border Patrol agents, the National...

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26 Oct

The Working Party on the accession of Viet Nam to the WTO completed its discussions today in Geneva and decided to approve Vietnam's application to join. Final approval by the WTO General Council should occur before the end of the year and Vietnam would become the 150th member of the WTO, leaving only Russia, Ukraine, and Iran as the...

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26 Oct

Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson have posted this piece on partisan entrenchment of constitutional norms. It’s a little juriscentric for my taste, although the piece is careful to allow for the constitutional consequence of legislative and executive branch actors (OLC in particular). It’s a useful historical description of how the appointments process has, on a hit-and-miss basis, worked...

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26 Oct

Do you like The Onion? Are you a big fan -- or big critic -- of the World Trade Organization? If so, here is the website for you. Perusing the site is a surreal experience; it seems so real, yet something is just a bit off...

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26 Oct

Yesterday I got in the mail this month’s issue of Wired. I love that magazine. It is great entertainment but one that keeps my brain cells alight and it is forward looking, always looking for the latest trend, the next, and the one after the next. Anyway, in it there was this little chart, mapping out lingo in natural sciences....

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26 Oct

The New Jersey Supreme Court in Lewis v. Harris ruled that the equal protection provisions of the New Jersey Constitution require equality of treatment for same-sex couples. But it left to the legislature the decision whether to amend the marriage statutes or create a new statutory structure for civil unions. In examining whether same-sex marriage is deeply rooted...

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25 Oct

I have posted a new essay on SSRN, "A Poisoned Chalice: The Substantive and Procedural Defects of the Iraqi High Tribunal." Here is the abstract:Scholars and human rights organizations have repeatedly criticized Saddam Hussein's initial trial for violating the basic requirements of international due process. Although those criticisms are justified, they are only half the story. A trial is...

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25 Oct

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the first and largest group of its kind, has given letter grades to every Representative and Senator based on their voting history on issues that affect soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, war veterans, and military families. The methodolgy used by the non-profit and non-partisan group was straightforward: To calculate the Ratings, IAVA reviewed...

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25 Oct

An outfit called the Better World Campaign is circulating a survey seeking to get U.S. senatorial and congressional candidates to commit to support of the United Nations. They seem to have very little participation so far, except from candidates in very safe seats like Carolyn Maloney from NY's Upper East Side. Check for your congressional candidate's views here....

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24 Oct

For almost two centuries, rationality has been a central postulate of social sciences. There are various ways to determine whether a certain behavior is “rational”, but, in general and at least since Enlightenment, we think one is acting “rationally” if one tries to maximize one’s own “utility”. Like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, this highly rational being, the homo economicus, free from...

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