In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

10 Nov

For those in NYC tomorrow, I wanted to note that NYU Law is hosting what promises to be an informative experts' meeting tomorrow on the International Criminal Court.  Here's the event description: How best to assure the independence of the ICC Prosecutor Friday, Nov. 11th from 6-7:30 p.m. NYU School of Law,  Lipton Hall, Faculty Club, 108 West 3rd Street, New York, New York The independence...

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07 Nov

Congratulations to Kal Raustiala and Laura Dickinson, the masterminds who conceived and carried out the first Research Forum sponsored by the American Society of International Law.  The forum took place this past weekend in Los Angeles, together with the ASIL Mid-Year Meeting, which ASIL President David Caron has successfully moved out of Washington and out among broader constituencies of international...

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07 Nov

Robert Reinstein is Clifford Scott Green Professor of Law at Temple University Law School and the author of Executive Power and the Law of Nations in the Washington Administration, which addresses the early history of the recognition power. M.B.Z. v. Clinton is the first case in which there is an apparent conflict between an act of Congress and the President’s authority...

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04 Nov

Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman, and Julian Barnes of the Wall Street Journal’s national security reporting team have a front page article today detailing the inside debates and, as the article says, policy changes around drone strikes in Pakistan over the several months.  It is a must-read for everyone who follows drone and targeted killing policy debates, and, I’m told, reflects months of reporting.  It is not a “here-is-the-leaked-document” kind of article, but instead a synthesis of many sources and an attempt to put together an account of months of debate and policy back-and-forth over how, when, who, and with whose permission to launch drone strikes in Pakistan’s territory.  
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04 Nov

Kevin Heller’s magisterial survey of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals offers the first comprehensive account of the trials, as well as an insightful analysis of the tribunals’ jurisprudence and legal basis. Heller is an international lawyer of considerable insight and his assessment of the trials is always judicious, frequently thought provoking, and, even if some scholars may quibble with this or...

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03 Nov

There is much to be analyzed in the Ninth Circuit's en banc decision in Sarei v. Rio Tinto. I am exercising a guest blogging privilege to address two aspects: its holding regarding the nature of the cause of action (and implicitly, the remedy) available under the ATS, and, the consequences of that holding to a proper understanding of the extension of that remedy...

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02 Nov

I have been raising various queries about the eurozone crisis and European governance - without making any claim to being an EU law scholar.  University of Connecticut's Peter Lindseth is just that, however, and points us to a relatively new blog, Eutopialaw.com, where he and a number of other experts post regularly on these topics.  I commend it to everyone,...

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02 Nov

On top of everything else, Congress now threatens to severely restrict official contacts with Iran.  This from Heather Hurlburt at Democracy Arsenal: If you're too transfixed by the prospect of the US losing its seat on the IAEA board of governors, losing Japanese funding through UNESCO for police training in Afghanistan, and potentially losing global patent protection, all...

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31 Oct

Although the twelve U.S. Nuremberg trials judged seven times as many defendants as the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and addressed a broader spectrum of international criminal law issues, including the first genocide prosecutions and the establishment of important principles of medical ethics, they have wallowed in comparative historical obscurity. The absence of meaningful coverage is ironic given, as Kevin...

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31 Oct

Today is an historic day in world population statistics, marking the day that planet reaches seven billion inhabitants. What is amazing is, despite the phenomenal growth in population, the citizens of the world are becoming healthier and wealthier every year. Gapminder has an incredibly interesting timeline that shows the progression of life expectancy (y axis) and income per...

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