Just when you thought the global financial crisis was subsiding, with returns to growth in most leading economies, including the US, Europe, China, etc., we have a counter-indicator. The Financial Times reports today that McDonald's is closing its three outlets in Iceland, citing the difficult economic environment: Iceland edged further towards the margins of the global economy on Monday whenMcDonald’s announced...
My colleague Trey Childress has a nice summary of the recent decision by a federal court in Florida in Osorio v. Dole Food Company to refuse to enforce a $97 million Nicaraguan judgment. Here's the key excerpt of the decision: “the evidence before the Court is that the judgment in this case did not arise out of proceedings that comported...
Following-up on my recent post on commercial space ventures, I note that Richard Bilder has a new article posted to SSRN: A Legal Regime for the Mining of Helium-3 on the Moon: U.S. Policy Options. I know that "helium-3" might sound like the name of some sci-fi show like "Deep Space 9," but it is really a great hope for...
Back in July, I had written a post about current issues in governmental space programs and I promised a follow-up on the private space industry. Well, that post never materialized. However, in lieu of that post I want to point to this post by author Brenda Cooper on Futurismic that has a quick and fun tour of the major U.S. players among the...
Assuming that the other Circuits follow suit, Roger is almost certainly right that the Second Circuit's recent decision in Talisman Energy "will be the death knell for most corporate liability claims under the Alien Tort Statute." That's regrettable in itself. What's particularly regrettable, though, is that the Second Circuit still has no idea what it's talking about when it comes...
Economic blackmail is a part of politics -- but Israel's latest ultimatum to the Palestinian Authority regarding the ICC is still unfortunate: Israel has warned the Palestinian Authority that it would condition permission for a second cellular telephone provider to operate in the West Bank - an economic issue of critical importance to the PA leadership - on the Palestinians withdrawing...
Over at Foreign Policy magazine's blog, Eric Posner has a brief, breezy column on differences, or not, between the Bush and Obama administrations on international law. Fun, quick read, whether one agrees or not. And events of the moment - the opening of the UN General Assembly, the UN confabs on things like climate change, the G-20 meetings, etc. -...
According to Newsweek, the answer may well be yes: As chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo has so far steered clear of controversial cases. In doing so, he hoped to allay U.S. fears that the ICC would become a politicized tool for settling scores. Which is why it's so surprising that Moreno-Ocampo is now considering an investigation into...
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner calls in the Financial Times for a tax on global financial transactions as a means of funding the currently moribund UN Millennium Development Goals. It is an idea that has been floated repeatedly since the 1990s - sometimes with the emphasis on the tax itself as a means of deliberately slowing down and making more...
[caption id="attachment_9642" align="alignright" width="137" caption=""][/caption] So what resulted from the past few days of G-20 meetings of finance ministers? And, particularly given the long-term conversation here at OJ about transnational networks and global governance, do the meetings offer any data point in that discussion? The principal policy debates at the G-20 meetings were over bonus/compensation issues for bankers (pressed hard by the...
As an American who has lived and received health care in two other industrialized Western countries (New Zealand and Australia), I know first-hand how pathetic American health care really is compared to its foreign counterparts. Unfortunately, because most Americans know very little about how the rest of the industrialized world provides (vastly superior and much cheaper) health care, conservatives have...
My friend and former colleague at Auckland, Mohsen Al Attar, has posted two new articles about TWAIL on SSRN. The first, co-written with Rosalie Moore, is entitled "TWAIL Revisited - The Bolivarian Reconstruction of International Law." The second, co-written with Vernon Ivan Tava, is entitled "TWAIL Pedagogy - Legal Education for Emancipation." The abstracts are after the jump. I highly recommend...
