The choice of book reviewer might be surprising but the result, unfortunately, is not. Yoo reviews two books: David Scheffer's memoir All the Missing Souls and William Shawcross' Justice and the Enemy. Scheffer's book details his time working on war crimes issues, ultimately as the Ambassador at Large on War Crimes, in President Clinton's State Department. (Disclosure: we hope to have Scheffer...
I am delighted to announce that Lt. Col. Chris Jenks -- currently the head of the International Law Branch at the U.S. Army JAG, an occasional contributor to Opinio Juris, and my very first PhD student (my colleague Gerry Simpson is his other supervisor) -- has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at SMU's Dedman School of Law. Chris will...
The Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) continues to prompt intense opposition from Americans overseas. In my post below, I suggested that some would simply take their citizenship underground, on the expectation of imperfect enforcement and the continuing value of holding a US passport -- becoming, in effect, secret Americans. Others are predicting that large numbers of Americans abroad will shed...
Opinio Juris seeks candidates for the position of Assistant Editor. Responsibilities include monitoring international law developments, liaising with permanent contributors to organize special events, working with guest bloggers and partner publications on submission of posts and commentary, and other administrative duties. It is anticipated that the assistant editor will work ten to twenty hours a week. The...
The US is one of the few countries in the world to tax nonresident citizens. But enforcement overseas has never been easy, or much of a priority. That is, until the authorities uncovered some big-time asset offshoring by resident citizens (yes, in Swiss bank accounts) for purposes of tax evasion. That resulted in legislation directed at foreign holdings of all US...
We hope you never left, but in case you have not been keeping up with Opinio Juris over the holiday season, here is what you missed: 1. Two excellent blog posts setting the record straight about the NDAA, graciously provided to us by two experts on the subject, Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck. You can find Part I here and Part...
In the comments to my previous post, I described refusing to allow comments on a blog as an "act of cowardice." Ben Wittes, one of the contributors to Lawfare, a blog that does not allow comments as a matter of policy, doesn't appreciate the description: Anyone who wants to understand why Lawfare does not take comments need only take a brief...
Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law at New York Law School and Visiting Professor at London School of Economics. She is the author of Transitional Justice (2000) and Humanity’s Law, which was published this fall by Oxford University Press. When the United Nations Security Council authorized the use of force to protect civilians in Libya, the...
The President signed the NDAA today, and issued the following signing statement. Steve Vladeck and I will shortly post on the details of the bill -- what's bad about it; how it has been widely misconstrued to be much worse than it is, in fact; and how in at least one important respect it marks an important resolution of an...
France has turned down the ICTY's request that it detain and turn over a former ICTY spokeswoman who has been sentenced to a week in prison for contempt of that court. PARIS — France refused Monday to carry out an arrest mandate from the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal against a French journalist convicted of contempt for revealing confidential information about the...
Big things are afoot in Europe, especially as the United Kingdom inches further and further away from European institutions. The U.K.'s refusal to join the recent fiscal reform plan has gotten all the headlines, but I hadn't realized that the U.K. is also embroiled in an ongoing battle of wills with the European Court of Human Rights over that Court's order...
I got a message from a journalist friend who needs urgent help with the following; if someone could put something into the comments to direct him, I'd be very grateful as I'm in a meeting at the moment where I'm not supposed to be doing this sort of thing online. He's looking for some kind of official source rather than...
