I have been mildly obsessed with the dispute between the Philippines and China for over three years now. It touches on so many areas of my research interest: international courts, China, and the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. So I am almost sad that the dispute, at least for legal purposes, finally ended today with the arbitral...
Here’s your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Violent clashes in South Sudan claimed the lives of two Chinese U.N. peacekeepers, bringing to three the number of troops China has lost in the past two months as it ramps up its engagement in peacekeeping efforts. Al Shabaab Islamist militants rammed a car packed...
William Gibson, repurposing a Gertrude Stein quip, said about cyberspace "there's no there, there" capturing the ethos of the internet as a place beyond the physical world of borders and jurisdiction. Bitcoin melded cryptography and networked processing to attempt to make a currency that was not based in or controlled by any state. But the internet is based on servers and...
Today through Wednesday, June 27-29, 2016, the Annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law will host its fifth edition, at the New York University School of Law. The Forum is convened by Dino Kritsiotis (Univ. of Nottingham), Anne Orford (Univ. of Melbourne), and JHH Weiler (EUI/NYU), who will be joined this year by Benedict Kingsbury (NYU) and José Alvarez (NYU)...
Here’s your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa The United States and France supported Hissène Habré, the former Chadian dictator who was convicted of atrocity crimes on May 30, 2016, throughout his rule, Human Rights Watch said in two reports released today. The Eighth Africa Carbon Forum will focus on ensuring that countries...
[Laurence R. Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law at Duke University and a permanent visiting professor at iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen.] As the world reacts to the shock of the Brexit referendum, international lawyers are turning their attention to the mechanics of Britain’s departure from the EU. Article 50 of...
Last week, Adrian Hilton -- a self-described "conservative academic, theologian, author and educationalist" -- published a vicious hit-piece in The Spectator about SOAS. It's entitled "A School of Anti-Semitism?", and the name basically says it all. According to Hilton: "[p]retty much all student societies at SOAS have no choice but to conform to the Islamo-Marxist orthodoxy"; "the entire student body defines...
We at Opinio Juris are very proud that our colleague Duncan Hollis of Temple University Law School was elected on June 15 by the General Assembly of the Organization of American States to the Inter-American Juridical Committee, which ...
I thought I had largely said what I had to say concerning emojis and international law in my previous post. SRSLY. ;-) But then John Louth, who knows of my interest in issues of recognition and non-recognition of aspirant states, pointed out this article from Wired which discusses, among other things, the issue of which national flags are awarded emoji and...
The Unicode Consortium's job has always been to make basic symbols work across all computers and other devices, but the emoji has put the group at the center of pop culture. "Our goal is to make sure that all of the text on computers for every language in the world is represented,"However, as Mashable notes:
getting characters added to the Unicode Standard is a long, drawn-out process. In addition to the original Japanese emoji characters, the Unicode additions included other new characters — such as country maps and European symbols. What this means is that there is a data file that maps every individual emoji symbol to a Unicode code point or sequence. But this is just the standardization of the symbols. Supporting emoji, as well as the specific design of the emoji characters, is up to software makers.Thus, the administrative scaffolding that makes emojis ubiquitous is based on a non-governmental standard-setting body using soft law to allocate Unicode points or sequences to symbols (be they emojis, letters, mathematical symbols, etc.) that are approved by the Consortium. The approval of emojis is simply one example of a set of responsibilities with much broader implications than just whether "nauseated face" deserves its own encoding. (According to the Consortium, it does.) Besides interest in the process of institutional decision-making in standard-setting bodies such as the Consortium, there is also a question of whether the Consortium’s overall goal of ensuring that the script of every language in the world is represented digitally is in tension the current focus on encoding more and more emoji. Some have expressed concern that this focus on emojis may divert time and resources away from the protection of endangered languages. Peoples who are trying to preserve endangered languages (such as, for example, Native American and First Nation languages) would be greatly helped if the alphabet of that language would be as easy to read across a variety of computer platforms and digital devices as a smiley-face. Consider this an issue of resource allocation. Letterjuice, a Brighton and Barcelona-based type foundry, posted a thoughtful essay on Unicode and language rights, which stated:
This summer we will host our Fourth Annual Emerging Voices symposium, where we invite doctoral students and early-career academics or practicing attorneys to tell Opinio Juris readers about a research project or other international law topic of interest. If you are a doctoral student or in the early stages of your career (e.g., post-docs, junior academics or early career practitioners within...
