General

[Vince Vitowsky has asked me to post this announcement from Joe D. Whitley about an upcoming ABA two-day event that might interest readers.] Thursday, March 22, 2012-Friday, March 23, 2012 Capital Hilton 1001 16th Street NW Washington, District of Columbia, United States 20036 As Program Chair and Vice-Chair of the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, I would like to invite you to...

[The good folks at VJIL asked that I pass the following announcement along] Now in its fifty-second year, the Virginia Journal of International Law is the oldest continuously published, student-edited law journal in the United States. The Journal addresses issues such as international commercial transactions, trade law, international litigation and arbitration, international organizations, international human rights law, and comparative law. The...

Cross-posted at LieberCode. I have written before about the Government’s new position in the Hamdan case.  As you will recall, Hamdan was convicted by a military commission for providing material support, sentenced to five and a half years, and released for time served.  He is now appealing his conviction. The latest government brief before the D.C. Circuit represents a significant...

Cross-posted at LieberCode. David Rieff has an interesting – and somewhat polemical – article in the latest Foreign Policy.  Rieff, you will recall, was an early supporter of intervention, a policy position no doubt influenced by his time spent in Bosnia which culminated in Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. Although initially hawkish on intervention, and willing to support liberal...

For those of you no longer getting the New York Times in print, this was the lead story in today's paper.  (Somewhat weirdly, it shows up on the webpage as a blog post.)  Apple's signing on to Fair Labor Association standards and auditing is probably the biggest thing ever to happen in the world of private, rights-related codes of conduct....

Matters in Syria are going from bad to worse.  I am sure this won't do any harm, but it is not going to help either.  It will simply give the illusion that the international community is dong something about Syria. Syrian officials suspected of committing or ordering crimes against humanity should face prosecution in the International Criminal Court (ICC), the United...

I found this interview in Der Spiegel of Fritz Vahrenholt, a German renewable energy executive and a former Social Democratic Party figure fascinating since he doesn't fit the profile of most climate change skeptics.  Varenholt has a new book coming out, "Die Kalte Sonne" (The Cold Sun), rejecting the IPCC's global warming models and climate change predictions. I don't know what to make...

Should human rights folks still defend him? Spain’s Supreme Court on Thursday convicted the crusading human rights judge Baltasar Garzón of illegally ordering wiretapping in a corruption case and suspended him from the courts for 11 years. I don't know much about the background of this case. It appears to be a very serious conviction, unrelated to his more celebrated investigation of Franco-era...

If you happen to be around Charlottesville tomorrow, Friday, February 10, you might want to come over to a symposium on how to resolve conflicting legal norms in US and foreign courts: The conference – organized by the student-run Virginia Journal of International Law and the John Bassett Moore Society of International Law – will explore how to resolve conflicting legal norms...

My brilliant St. John's colleague Adam Zimmerman recently posted his thoughts on global trends in the area of mass settlements at Prawfsblawg.  He argues that American-style "bottom up" approaches to class actions has been converging with the "top down" approach prevalent in Europe and other jurisdictions.  Questions about how to compensate large groups of claimants (e.g., victims of the BP...

Although I've blogged with Opinio Juris for more than six years now, I would never describe myself as a frequent blogger; at my best, I'll give you 2 posts a week, more often just one.  Of late, however, my blogging has been even more sporadic. Here's the reason: After more than two years of work, of which the last 3 months were...

Just a note to point you to OJ's Twitter feed, which you can find here.  We link to posts on the blog, but there's also added content in the form of pointers to other items that might be of interest to OJ readers. For those of you that haven't taken up the habit, some serious material is floating around the Twitterverse...