Consider three different takes within the last two weeks on the rise of China and impliedly American decline, with different preoccupations. The first is historian Paul Kennedy’s take in TNR. It’s a puzzling admixture of “don’t worry, it’s just a rebalancing that was bound to happen if you take the long view,” and “do worry, because the moves the US is...
Secretary Clinton yesterday released the much-awaited first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. It's an important document, and if implemented (a big if, given the shift in Congress and threats to cut State's funding) it would have important consequences on the ground. The central theme of "civilian power" has a nice ring to it in the context of situating diplomacy, a...
Video here. (Downfall producers seem to have unblocked these parodies, which had been taken down some time ago for copyright reasons. Lawprofs might be entertained by this one, clearly composed by someone in our ranks -- the mindset of someone who's taught for a while is perfectly satirized in a way that no outsider could, ever.)...
Having received a number of emails complaining about how I counted the size of various faculties, I have decided to remove both posts. As I made clear in the original post, my count was not designed to be scientific and excluded -- rightly or wrongly -- a number of categories of scholars that some might believe should have been included. ...
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...
