The Times and others are reporting that current Acting Head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice, David Barron, will be leaving his post this summer to head back to his professorship at Harvard Law School. (OLC rose to national prominence during the last administration as the home of John Yoo and colleagues, who...
U.S. courts have long struggled with questions about the extraterritorial scope of U.S. federal law. Many U.S. laws regulating business activities, most notoriously antitrust law, have been interpreted to apply to conduct outside U.S. territory, even by foreign nationals. And this all has been a constant irritant to foreign nations, who have sometimes complained about the expansive, sometimes imperialistic, application...
I tread warily into ICJ blogging after my last bizarre brain cramp, but I can't resist commenting on Roger's posts (and the comments to his posts by very knowledgeable folks like Paul Stephan and David Kaye) on the new U.S. nominee Joan Donoghue. Unlike Roger, I don't have a problem with Donoghue's qualifications in general (although it is worth pointing...
I'm on radio silence, as I'm at the Naval War College conference on international law, which is where all the cool people are this week ...
Cross-posted at Balkinization Nothing like summertime to catch up on a little light reading I spent too little time with during the semester. So especially after being re-energized at this year’s American Constitution Society Convention (where I did a panel with Gene Fidell and others far more interesting than I on military commissions vs. federal courts, and got treated to...
I don't know what to make of this report about a controversial device used to repel teenagers and children by using a high-pitched frequency only young people can hear. The mosquito works by emitting a pulse at 16-18.5 kilohertz that switches on and off four times a second for up to 20 minutes. It emits an irritating, high-pitched sound that can...
Peyton Cooke has an interesting paper on the status of "intelligence" activities in international and domestic law. It doesn't seem to be on SSRN, but it is "Bringing the Spies in from the Cold: Legal Cosmopolitanism and Intelligence under the Laws of War," 44 USFLRev 601 (Winter 2010). The argument takes up Eric Posner's critique of "legal cosmopolitanism," as a...
I kind of expected this would turn out this way, but it does the Rwandan government no credit that they finally released jailed U.S. law professor Peter Erlinder, albeit on bail and due to concerns about his health. Needless to say, I doubt Professor Erlinder will be returning to Rwanda anytime soon. Peter Erlinder, the American lawyer jailed inRwanda after being...
Interesting story in the NYT about the U.N.'s difficulty in creating a fair and effective system to resolve internal disputes, especially employee disputes. Last July, the U.N. created a new Dispute Tribunal composed of independent judges to remedy a much despised previous system. But the new Tribunal, and the U.N. bureaucracy's unwillingness to cooperate with it, is getting some tough...
It is worth also considering the views of those critical of the entire ICC effort to the define aggression and bring it within the ICC Statute. Brett Schaefer at Heritage offers this final take, which he calls the U.S. effort a qualified success due to its ability to delay implementation and to insert "understandings" into the ICC Statute. [T]he U.S. was...
Over at AidWatch (William Easterly's blog), guest blogger Moussa P. Blimpo puts up a post on the role of universities in development in poor countries, in Africa and elsewhere. There are a lot of tradeoffs, explicit and implied - should universal primary education take precedence over university education, for example. What is the role of universities in poor countries in...
John Bellinger has a nice op-ed today pointing out that the 112th Congress is on course to set a record for the fewest treaties ratified during a single session of Congress. Despite the presence of 59 Democrats, the Senate has approved only one treaty (a tax agreement with France) during the 112th Congress. The Obama administration must make more vigorous efforts...
