Larry Solum has kicked off an interesting exchange on interdisciplinary ignorance among legal academics. My question: how do international law scholars line up against their peers on this measure? My hunch is that IL scholars are more likely to have some interdisciplinary grounding than lawprofs in other fields, for two reasons. First, there was the payoff of...
Today, Seton Hall Law School is hosting a Guantanomo “Teach-In.” Here’s how the steering committee co-chairs, Mark Denbeaux and Alan Sussman describe the event: With more than 200 schools in at least 44 states already participating, "Guantánamo: How Should We Respond?” is an unprecedented collaborative effort of academia, journalism, religion, medicine and even the military in exploring the...
Lost amidst the blizzard of legislation and memorandum (and congressional teenage sex scandals) is this presidential declaration of policy against "destructive fisheries practices." Bush has placed the administration behind an Australian-led effort at the U.N. General Assembly to ban "bottom fishing" via trawlers, thought to cause serious environmental damage (see the Wapo article here). The General Assembly is...
In case you missed it, the Supreme Court is now offering same-day transcripts of oral arguments. The first example came in the immigration case of Lopez v. Gonzalez. Don't miss the end of the transcript where there is an extremely useful index. If you want to see whether the oral argument in this statutory construction case addressed...
With the Supreme Court's new term now underway I was interested in exploring the cases on the docket relevant to our field. So far it appears that the docket is remarkably thin in terms of cases that relate to foreign relations, international law and/or comparative constitutionalism. Of course, it is possible and even likely that more interesting IL/IR...
[Opinio Juris note: Geoffrey Corn, a former Opinio Juris guest blogger who is a military law expert teaching at South Texas Law School, has sent along the following thoughts on the Military Commission Act.] It is by now apparent to most interested observers (and probably quite a few not so interested observers) that the Military Commission Act of 2006 has triggered...
Don't worry, this post is not about President Bush's authority to exercise "unreviewable statutory authority" in the war on terrorism. Rather, it is about how President Bush does get to exercise "unreviewable statutory authority" in the administration of U.S. trade laws. Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Motion Systems v. Bush, a case challenging President Bush's...
As the only candidate to receive the approval of all five permanent members of the UN Security Council, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon seems certain to become the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations. The pre-voting procedure of the Security Council involves a series of "straw polls" to indicate whether Security Council members encourage, discourage, or have no...
My vote for the most important international law case in the month of September is the ECJ decision in Commission v. Netherlands. The case is important in articulating the standard for the free movement of capital and affirming the protections guaranteed to foreign investors under the EC Treaty. It is another significant blow to government practices put in...
Peggy and I have both noted a subtle erosion in the Bush adminstration's opposition to the ICC. See, for example, here and here. That erosion continued today, as President Bush announced that he was using his authority under Section 2007 of the American Servicemembers Protection Act to permit the U.S. to resume military aid to 21 countries who...
I just came across the text of the statements by the military leaders of the coup in Thailand. I was dumbstruck by how, well, polite they were in terminating the Constitution and disbanding the government. Here is the money quote: "Now the Administrative Reform Group under the Democratic System with the King as the Head of State, comprising commanders...
I’d like to thank Chris, Peggy, Julian, Roger, Kevin, Duncan, and Peter for asking me to join Opinio Juris for the next two weeks as a guest blogger. Currently, I’m in Arusha, Tanzania, spending a month seconded to the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). (Standard disclaimers apply: the views expressed...
