General

Drone Warfare Clearly Getting Out of Hand

Georgetown Symposium: Corporate Responsibility and the Alien Tort Statute

Just a quick note to flag an upcoming symposium at Georgetown Law on Corporate Responsibility under the Alien Tort Statute. It's scheduled for all day March 27, 2012.  Here's a quick description of the event: Alien Tort Statute (ATS) litigation has emerged as a focal point in the field of corporate responsibility over the past decade, as foreign plaintiffs alleging violations...

Chevron Strikes Back

Chevron strikes back, and the pro-Ecuador NGOs are not happy about it. WASHINGTON, Feb. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- An "order" issued Thursday from a private investor arbitration panel purporting to freeze a nine-year environmental litigation against Chevron in Ecuador violates international law and will have little or no impact on any potential enforcement action against the oil giant in...

American Bar Association’s 7th Annual Homeland Security Law Institute

[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...

Virginia Journal of International Law Launches VJIL Digest

[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...

Conspiracy and the New Hamdan Argument

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...

Syria and the Overlapping Consensus

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...

Apple and Human Rights: Could the Market Work?

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....

Since the Security Council Won’t Act, Send in the ICC?

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...

Did the IPCC Screw Up Climate Change Policy?

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...