My colleague David Post and I have an op-ed in today's National Law Journal. In it, we challenge the sufficiency of existing responses to cyberattacks, whether in terms of pushing for heightened security, more criminal law enforcement or applying the laws of war (if applicable). Criminal law (and the laws of war for that matter) depends on identifying and holding...
I still think there is no chance of this happening, but Christopher Hitchens offers this narrative of how and why he is pushing for legal action against the Vatican, or maybe at least a deposition of the Pope himself. I telephoned a distinguished human-rights counsel in London, Geoffrey Robertson, and asked him if the law was powerless to intervene. Not at...
The International Whaling Commission's proposed compromise on the whaling dispute has been released (h/t Jurist). As I noted before, the proposed deal would bring all nations within the IWC framework, but explicitly permit commercial whaling for certain nations for at least the next 10 years. The numbers permitted under the proposal is a little murky, but it may include thousands...
Cross-posted on Balkinization and Scotusblog Since Justice Stevens announced his intention to retire, discussions about what his departure will mean for the Court have regularly noted his military service in World War II. The justice enlisted the day before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor (and has joked about how the enemy responded to the news immediately). There is little...
I haven't really looked at it, but here is the ICJ's judgment in the Argentina-Uruguay Pulp Mill Dispute. Although the Court found that Uruguay violated certain procedural obligations, it essentially ruled in favor of Uruguay on all substantive obligations (or it simply ruled that certain issues, like pollution effects, were outside its jurisdiction). On the substantive obligations, there were three...
Current and former federal prisoners allege that the low wages they were paid for work performed in prison violated their rights under the Fifth Amendment and various sources of international law.... Plaintiffs earned between $19.00 and $145.00 per month at rates as low as nineteen cents per hour. Plaintiffs contend that by paying them such low wages, Defendants ... violated Plaintiffs’ rights under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution; articles 7 through 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”); a U.N. document entitled “Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners;” and the law of nations.
In this fascinating profile of Jeffrey Lena, the lead (and perhaps only) lawyer for the Vatican in defending sex-abuse related lawsuits in the U.S., one also gets an update on the status of the various U.S. litigations against the Vatican. The current Supreme Court petition for consideration is Holy See v. John Doe. The Court hasn't yet decided whether to...
In all the amused press notices about George Washington's (very) overdue library books, one small detail is worth noting. The library's ledgers show that Washington took out the books on 5 October 1789, some five months into his presidency at a time when New York was still the capital. They were an essay on international affairs called Law of Nations and...
Our friends at the Leiden Journal of International Law -- an exceptional journal -- have asked us to post the following call for papers: Special Issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law (2011) Foucault and International Law Abstracts due by 12 May 2010; Complete articles by 17 September 2010 The Leiden Journal of International Law is now soliciting articles for a special issue exploring the relevance...
Baltasar Garzón, the radical and ambitious investigative magistrate, made his name in Spain by revealing the tactics of Spanish counter-terrorism officials in the 1990s. In 1998, he ordered the arrest of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in a London hospital and in 2009 he proposed trying White House lawyers for the advice they gave George W. Bush on the legality of detaining prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. His agenda is consistently controversial. To some it looks like battling corruption on an ever bigger stage. To others it looks like corruption itself.
I am pretty supportive of Obama Administration's general approach to Sudan, largely because it reflects a realistic sense of the limits of the U.S. government's ability to influence matters there as well as the (relative) unimportance of Sudan to the U.S. and to the wider region. And so I think the hardline ICC-favored approach to Sudan (demand the arrest of...
