In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

08 Aug

Friend of Opinio Juris and current President of the American Branch of the International Law Association, Ruth Wedgwood, passes along the following announcement for teaching opportunities at the Nanjing campus of Johns Hopkins SAIS. They are looking for visitors in political science, economics, and international law: The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) invites applications for one-year...

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08 Aug

The Transatlantic Academy is seeking young legal scholars to submit proposals for its 2012-2013 fellowship program. This looks like a great opportunity to partner with scholars in political science and economics in areas affecting the transatlantic relationship. Note next year's theme is a broad view of the "Western Liberal Order": The Transatlantic Academy is seeking candidates to serve as resident Fellows...

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04 Aug

Ruti Teitel is Ernst Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law at New York Law School and Visiting Professor, London School of Economics.  She is the author of the forthcoming book, Humanity’s Law (Oxford University Press Sept. 2011). For many Egyptians, Hosni Mubarak’s trial is no mere consequence of Egypt’s revolution but the fulfillment of its promise.  In the Arab Spring, accountability for...

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02 Aug

Last week, we were pleased to host a great discussion of the book International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court.  This week, I'm pleased to announce that one of its editors -- Bill Dodge -- is taking a leave from his faculty post at Hastings to become the newest Counselor in International Law to the State Department Legal Adviser, Harold...

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27 Jul

Ken Anderson, Jeremy Rabkin, and Jenny Martinez expand in various ways on the concern about constructing a grand narrative introduced on Monday by Harlan Cohen. Anderson discusses a number of questions that might have been used to frame the narrative: legitimacy, the use of international law as a sword or a shield, sovereignty versus internationalism, authority and deference, hegemony, and...

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26 Jul

The joy of this project was making the kind of discovery Roger Alford recounts in his post. Alford’s chapter on international law as interpretive tool from 1901 to 1945 discusses, among other things, the Supreme Court’s various approaches to the extraterritorial reach of statutes during that period. Among these approaches was the government purpose test of Unites States v. Bowman...

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26 Jul

Harlan Cohen raises an important caution against being swept up in the attraction, indeed intellectual comfort, of an intellectual grand narrative that can give apparent coherence to a topic as broad-ranging and heterogeneous as international law in the Supreme Court.  The point is very well taken, particularly as it runs to the framing of historical periods; the device of historical periods is useful - essential even - to a point, but only if it is taken as the starting point for sorting things out and not the final arbiter of interpretation, especially on any particular matter. That said, there is more than simply an organizational imperative in asking some framing questions.  I'd like to raise a couple of them here, as a preface for the kinds of issues that most intrigue me in looking at this marvelous study.  They are not in any logical order, and one might easily argue that I've followed a kind of narrative imperative in the ones I've chosen, but they still seem to me important in practically any kind of historical study of this area.
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26 Jul

I don't mean to interrupt this great discussion of the "International Law in the Supreme Court" Book Discussion (to which I also made a very small contribution).  But I can't resist a brief note on a case this term that promises to bring international law back to the Supreme Court, if only indirectly.  Here is the NYT write-up: Menachem Zivotofsky was...

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