I always wish I had more opportunities to blog about international environmental law (IEL), especially in light of recent developments (and thanks to Dan Bodansky for keeping our readers' abreast of all the happenings in Cancun). For those of you who have a similar affinity for IEL, check out the new(ish) blog from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). It's...
Buried in a post from Ben Wittes at Lawfare is a suggestion (in response to HRW's Tom Malinowski) that the Espionage Act shouldn't apply outside US territory to non-citizens: [T]his statute has a nuance that makes one pause before treating it as just another extraterritorial application of American law. That nuance is that the entire moral force of a...
"The majority of the Supreme Court said that although they would not stop publication in advance, the question of whether there could be prosecution afterwards was a completely different thing." --former Attorney General Michael Mukasey on the Pentagon Papers Mukasey is right. It seems that in the attempts to compare this case to the Pentagon Papers, the essential distinction between the...
Oh, how much difference a year -- and lower expectations -- make! The BBC report on the Cancun meeting declared that "if Copenhagen was the Great Dane that whimpered, Cancun has been the Chihuahua that roared." Never mind that the Great Dane's whimper was about the same decibel level as the Chihuahua's roar. Last year, expectations were sky high for a new legal...
The government of India is protesting TSA's "humiliating" pat-down of its ambassadress to the United States. On Dec 4, [Ambassador Meera] Shankar was subjected to a rigorous public "pat down" at the Jackson-Evers International Airport after a visit as a guest of the Mississippi State University. According to The Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Shankar was singled out from a group...
The climate negotiations were cast as a choice last year between Hopenhagen or Nopenhagen, and this year between Can-Cun or Can’t-Cun. John Ashton, the senior negotiator from the UK Foreign Office, told me yesterday that he sees four possible outcomes here: momentum, a lifeline, zombie-hood, or collapse. Since no one wishes to push the negotiations over the brink (on the...
This message just went out on Twitter: WE ARE ATTACKING WWW.VISA.COM IN AN HOUR! GET YOUR WEAPONS READY http://bit.ly/e6iR3X AND STAY TUNED. #ddos #wikiealsk #payback Sure sounds like war to me. I have no idea what the weapons actually consist of, but they were apparently effective earlier today against Mastercard. I wonder if Visa's "troops" are now metaphorically massing on the other...
According to Oxford University Press, my book checks in at a healthy 452 pages. I still can't quite believe that I wrote something so long -- approximately 165,000 words, 130,000 more than anything else I've ever written. Writing the book was extremely fun, but the hard work before the writing, the researching and the outlining, was often anything but. It's...
Needless to say, there’s a much warmer atmosphere at this year’s climate conference in Cancun than last year’s conference in Copenhagen. By all accounts, the Mexicans have done a great job both in preparing the diplomatic groundwork for this year’s meeting and in running the conference during its first week. They certainly have learned the lessons of the last war. ...
It's easy to laugh at the USG for its directives to employees re the handling of Wikileaks cables (as the NYT put it this morning, a case of "shutting the barn door after the horse has left"). The idea that a State Department employee talking about the cables in a Starbucks, much less with her spouse at home, would constitute...
Well, not quite that broad, but almost. This letter from career services at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (posted here) is a stunner: Hi students, We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for...
And why not? Assuming that the feds don't catch up with this operation at this rate (by my calculation) we have more than four years of daily document dumps ahead of us. From Foreign Policy, let's welcome Wikileaked to the blogosphere. Today's highlights include more accounts of inebriated and otherwise less-than-sparkling eastern European and central Asian leaders. (Material from these realms...
