When Peter Spiro wrote to ask me back in 2007 whether I might be interested in writing a response to then-State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger’s posts on the blog, Opinio Juris, I had two nearly simultaneous reactions: (1) The U.S. State Department Legal Adviser was writing on a blog?!; and (2) Yes. I am, as I take it...
In a comment to a recent post, Patrick O’Donnell noted a post from the first year of Opinio Juris in which I had taken a crack at starting a list of the “must reads “of international law. I wanted to get a discussion going over what should be the key scholarly texts in our field. Opinio Juris readers made significant...
When Chris, Julian and I started our modest “conversation” about international law ten year ago, we were not universally praised. Nor were we instantly accepted. Who did we think we were, we pre-tenure punks just starting out in this field? And what were people to make of this short-form, internet-based content? As Chris noted, we really didn’t know what we...
One of my first posts with Opinio Juris remains one of my all time favorites -- Strawberries versus Skin Cancer. Looking back, that post marked a transition point for me as a scholar and an academic; in it, I began to allow myself to think more critically about my former employer, the U.S. State Department, even as I remained loyal to...
You know you’ve reached a certain age when you start saying, “I remember when. . .” Well, I remember when international law was considered a legal chimera and an academic backwater. Policymakers would take it into account in only a limited set of circumstances, and then usually only where it was consistent with other agendas. In law schools it was ghettoized:...
I started blogging at Opinio Juris in June 2005. My first post was a postcard from India. Since that time I have published over 1,000 posts. During that same ten-year period I have also published dozens of articles and a few books. In light of that background, I thought I would use Opinio Juris’ ten-year anniversary...
It may be hard to believe, but this week Opinio Juris is celebrating its tenth anniversary. In a placeholder post prior to our commencing regular blogging, Peggy, Julian, and I had explained: Our modest goal is to share with our readers a variety of perspectives on the role of international law in the U.S. and around the globe and to stimulate...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa A girl perhaps no more than 10 years old detonated powerful explosives concealed under her veil at a crowded northern Nigeria market on Saturday, killing as many as 20 people and wounding many more. On Sunday, at least six people were killed after two suspected child suicide bombers...
I'm pleased to note that Andrew Guzman is leaving Berkeley Law to become Dean of USC's Gould School of Law (see here for the USC announcement, and here for Berkeley's take). Andrew's a renowned scholar of international law, with major works on international trade, regulation, investment and public international law, including some seminal work on using rationale choice theory to explain the international...
This holiday season, we trust Santa was still as safe as back in 1961 and that nobody received a lump of coal. We found some time to post, so if you were too busy to visit our blog, here is what you missed. Kevin posted about a virtual roundtable on David Bosco's "Rough Justice" in which he participated over at H-Diplo, and...
Just a quick heads-up that tomorrow, January 10th, is the Tenth Anniversary of Opinio Juris! All next week we will have posts looking back on the first decade of the blog as well as on the decade in international law. And we will also have posts looking forward...
In case you missed it Monday, departing U.S. State Department special envoy for closing Guantanamo had a sharp op-ed in the N.Y. Times, marking the administration’s recent successes at moving detainees out of the prison and urging that further progress be made. Among other things, Sloan highlights several “fundamental misconceptions” he believes are behind continuing opposition in Congress and elsewhere...
