An Italian kidnapped by al-Qaeda insurgents in Algeria and held for 14 months has been freed in northern Mali. Denmark has established a Commission of Inquiry into its role in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. EJIL has an in-depth post about it here. The Arab League has urged Syria to implement the ceasefire plan after being briefed by Kofi Annan. The definition of piracy...
The answers to my questions last week were no further away than the latest copy of the AJIL and an important article by Emilie Hafner-Burton, David Victor, and Yonatan Lupu on Political Science Research and International Law: The State of the Field. This is a must-read for anyone interested in IR/IL, past and future. As for the "war on paradigms", it has...
Michigan Law Review is out with its Annual Survey of Books in the law, and while the self-promotion is awkward at the least, it feels a bit more in the interest of full disclosure (given what I’ve blogged about here in the past) to note that the issue includes my review of Ben Wittes’ latest book, Detention and Denial. A...
The US-backed Korean-American Jim Yong Kim was named the next president of the World Bank, in a move that drew criticism about the purported dominance of the post by the United States. The Philippines will take its dispute with China in the South China Sea to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). Meanwhile, Tokyo's governor wants to use public fund to purchase...
Daniel Klaidman, the journalist whose June 2012 book "Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency" looks to be a must-read, has sent in a guest post to Lawfare discussing how the Stephen Preston speech came about and a bit of the inside maneuvering around the succession of speeches by Eric Holder, Harold Koh,...
Dean Paul Schiff Berman has a new book entitled Global Legal Pluralism (Cambridge University Press 2012) that I heartily recommend to our readers. Here's the abstract: We live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, supranational, and nonstate communities. Navigating these...
Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla has admitted for the first time that the country's brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship "disappeared" leftist opponents and said babies were kidnapped from their parents. A team of six UN observers has gone to Syria, where despite both sides agreeing to a truce, violence is still raging. South Sudan has accused Sudan of indiscriminate bombing in a dispute...
China will begin delivering oil ships to Iran in May, two months ahead of a European ban on tankers carrying Iranian crude. Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in an op-ed that Iran hopes for dialogue and trust from all sides going forward in nuclear talks and that it will be a process, not an event. The Guardian has an article...
Two calls for papers for ASIL events are closing on April 15 and April 20 Second Annual ASIL Research Forum October 20-21, 2012, Athens, GA The American Society of International Law calls for submissions of scholarly paper proposals for the ASIL Research Forum to be held at the University of Georgia School of Law on October 20-21, 2012. The Research Forum, a Society initiative...
Dioncounde Traore will be sworn in as Mali's interim president today and is tasked with pulling the nation in turmoil back on the right track. Syria has said it will comply with its truce deadlines today by halting military activity, but reserves its right to combat terrorist attacks. Kofi Annan says that Iran can be part of Syria's solution. In the wake...
In 1973, Hans Blix and Jirina Emerson edited the Treaty Maker’s Handbook to help newly emerging States appreciate, post-decolonization, the intricacies of treaty-making as a matter of both domestic and international law. One of the work’s lasting legacies was the inclusion of sample provisions drawn from existing treaties on various treaty topics such as participation, entry into force, reservations, and...
