In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

07 Apr

The American Society of International Law recently awarded its annual certificates and prizes for scholarship in international law.  A number of the winners have either been involved in OJ symposia or are friends of the blog, so I want to acknowledge their achievements here: Certificate of Merit in a specialized area of international law: Mark Osiel, "The End of Reciprocity: Terror,...

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06 Apr

Walter Russell Mead has an illuminating post on the liberal internationalist tendencies of the Obama Administration.  Putting aside whether or not liberal internationalism is, as Mead puts it, "a strategic mistake that leads a lot of people inside the administration and well beyond it to make consistently bad decisions about American foreign policy.", I find his post fascinating for its classification of different approaches...

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06 Apr

"An ancient gold tablet, discovered during archaeological excavations in 1913 in the Ottoman Empire, disappeared from a Berlin museum in the immediate aftermath of World War II and reappeared almost sixty years later in the safe deposit box of a Holocaust survivor." So begins In re Flamenbaum, a case that reads like a Hollywood movie script. As reported here, "the...

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06 Apr

It's not exactly a hot topic, even among international lawyers, yet the ongoing dispute over the Western Sahara (and Morocco's claim to it) has drawn the attention of 54 U.S. Senators, who recently sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Clinton about it favoring support for Morocco's 2007 proposal for autonomy in the disputed region. This analysis claims the...

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03 Apr

I don't know if I buy this article's suggestion that the various Catholic Church priest-pedophile scandals amount to a "crime against humanity" under international law, but I do think the Pope's right to "head of state" immunity under international law is a tough question.  In the U.S., the Pope has been granted head of state immunity (thanks to President Bush...

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01 Apr

Not a funny April Fool's Day joke, although it sort of sounds like one. Any of our readers in Coffs Harbour, NSW, please check out your window and give the Australian Federal Police a hand. THE Australian Federal Police are continuing to frantically search for an Australian accused of war crimes, after a five-year legal battle ended with the High Court...

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31 Mar

There is an old adage that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.  The rejoinder is that a liberal is a conservative who has been indicted.  Speaking of which, an intriguing development in the case of the Christian terrorists: All members of the anti-government Hutaree group, who wanted to start a violent revolution against the government...

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31 Mar

This is just the first round of a potentially huge investor-state arbitration claim filed by Chevron against Ecuador. $700 million now, but up to $27 billion later. (For some background, see here and here about a federal court's refusal to stay one of the arbitration proceedings.). Chevron Corp (CVX.N) won a three-year-old arbitration fight against Ecuador over a commercial dispute as...

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30 Mar

Forgive the self-promotion, but I was just sent the cover of my co-edited book (with Markus Dubber, who teaches at Toronto), and I think it's really cool.  The Handbook, which will be published in November by Stanford University Press, is the first edited book on comparative substantive criminal law.  It contains seventeen chapters -- 16 chapters on the...

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29 Mar

I thought ASIL and the program organizers did a wonderful job with this year's Annual Meeting.  I particularly appreciated the opportunity to chair a panel, War and Law in Cyberspace.  In addition to a discussion of the technological capacities of cyberattacks and how they map onto the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, we had a good discussion of what...

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