Here is another persuasive account of why the U.S. is disadvantaged by not joining the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The case is fairly simple: There is a lot of oil and natural gas up there, and the U.S. can't negotiate with other countries to divvy it up until it signs on to UNCLOS. The 5.5 million-square-mile area...
The following is a guest post by Lt. Col. Chris Jenks, the Chief of the International Law Branch in the U.S. Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General. Lt. Col. Jenks is posting in his personal capacity. On March 8th, the Supreme Court "invited" the Solicitor General to file a brief in Carmichael v. Kellogg, Brown & Root...
In the long-running battle between Chevron and Ecuador over environmental damage, a federal court in New York has denied Ecuador's motion to stay arbitration of a Ecuador-U.S. BIT claim. In September 2009, Chevron filed a notice of arbitration alleging, among other things, that "Ecuador has breached ...
It is always unpleasant to get lectured by foreign governments about "violating international law", but this is something U.S. government officials should be used to. Still, it must be galling for the new U.S. administration to be lectured by Brazil's president over U.S. non-compliance with a WTO ruling on cotton subsidies. The United States must comply with a World Trade Organization...
As I have noted earlier, there is a pitched battle between victims of Pan Am 73 terrorist hijacking over the distribution of treaty funds secured by the United States for American victims in a 2008 diplomatic settlement with Libya. The treaty and Executive Order stipulate that the money shall be distributed solely for the benefit of United States nationals,...
The BBC reports: The European Court of Justice has ruled that Israeli goods made in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank cannot be considered Israeli. This means goods made by Israelis or Jews in the West Bank cannot benefit from a trade deal giving Israel preferential access to EU markets. At first glance, this seems like the correct result, especially given the...
That's the question, sort of, raised in Totes-Isotoner v. United States, the most interesting tariff classification case you will ever read. Under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, men's glove have a tariff rate of 14 percent whereas gloves "for other persons" have a rate of 12.6 percent. An importer of gloves, Totes-Isotoner, argues that these duties unconstitutionally discriminate on...
Over at Discover.com, Brian Lamb reports on a lecture by Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, an American Jesuit who is a research astronomer for the Vatican Observatory (and has archived blog posts here). On the issue of asteroid mining (which we tangentially touched upon in this discussion on legal issues related to mining the Moon), Lamb describes the opening of Brother Consolmagno's argument: Can...
I thank Professor C. Ford Runge for his comment on my article and agree with his analysis that places biofuels within a larger picture. From the Brazilian perspective, such heavy subsidies used by the United States and the European Union constitute the very “Gordian knot” of the negotiations in the Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organization. Naturally, that...
[C. Ford Runge is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law at the University of Minnesota.] Mairon G. Bastos Lima is to be congratulated for his coherent and ambitious proposal to rationalize the governance of biofuels through multilateral applications of the Rio and Good Governance principles. As he correctly observes, biofuels policies are highly nationalistic and lack...
[Mairon G. Bastos Lima is a PhD researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.] I thank the moderators of Opinio Juris for giving me this opportunity to reflect upon my article, entitled 'Biofuel Governance and Interational Legal Principles: Is It Equitable and Sustainable?'. Global climate change, energy insecurity, and the underdevelopment of rural areas have been crucial...
Professor Osofsky’s response to my article is convincing and her exploration of the gaps in my earlier discussion of climate reparations is welcome — in fact, it is encouraged. The hope in writing an article on climate reparations was to investigate seriously alternate avenues for remedy for the climate vulnerable and encourage creativity across scales, between novel claimants, and...
