In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

29 Jan

As we get closer to the review conference on the ICC, many of us have been watching, and perhaps commenting on, ways in which the US might or might not take part as an observer.  It seems certain that the US will be an observer at the review conference, and the primary issue on the table for the conference is the crime of aggression.  My own view of this is that the whole effort is a mistake - essentially for the reasons that Michael Glennon lays out in his fine new Yale International Law Journal article, The Blank Prose Crime of Aggression.  However, as I remark at the end of this post, whatever one's prescriptive views, descriptively the effort appears to raise questions about "contracting around" the Security Council in a changing world but un-amendable UN.
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28 Jan

For those of us living in the US, it is sometimes difficult to realize that interesting international legal events may also occur elsewhere; for instance, in the UK. Yet, times in the UK are very interesting indeed. This week alone the newspapers were filled with reports on the questioning of senior UK Foreign Office lawyers concerning the legality of the...

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28 Jan

One of the most fascinating topics (for positivists like myself anyway) is how customary international law incorporates a consensual element via the idea of persistent objectors.  Questions, of course, abound over why persistent objectors get an exemption from a customary rule, when subsequent objectors do not (unless other states acquiesce in the subsequent objector's departure from the rule, or take...

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27 Jan

This morning I had the distinct displeasure of being woken up by a phone call coming in on my Finnish cell phone, around 6 a.m. The caller turned out to be a Helsinki-based energy company, which started to promise me all sorts of cheap energy until I pointed out that I was currently residing in New York, that it was...

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26 Jan

    There are few international lawyers in the world who know more about climate change than Dan Bodansky. More generally, Dan is also an expert on international environmental law (IEL), and in this book he has distilled years of study and observation into a very readable yet sophisticated treatment of the subject. A successful overview and analysis of IEL is very...

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25 Jan

Opinio Juris is pleased to be hosting this week a discussion of Professor Dan Bodansky's new book, "The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law" (Harvard Univ. Press, 2010).  Dan is well known to our readers as a frequent guest blogger and commentator on international environmental law, a field in which he is one of the world's leading scholars.  The...

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25 Jan

If you haven't seen this already, you should. The eight-minute video shows the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent, 24-year-old Kseniya Simonova, dramatizing the effect of Operation Barbarossa on the Ukraine through a series of drawings on an illuminated sand table. It is absolutely mesmerizing -- beautiful, disturbing, moving. As you will see, many members of the audience...

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22 Jan

Anyone doing serious work on detention, Guantanamo, war on terror, any of these areas, will want to read an extraordinary new study just out from the Brookings Institution by Benjamin Wittes, Robert Chesney, and Rabea Benhalim, The Emerging Law of Detention: The Guantanamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking.  (I’ve given the SSRN free download link; here is a short NPR piece on it with legal affairs correspondent Ari Shapiro.) No matter what your particular legal viewpoint about detention and Guantanamo, I believe this report will be required reading because of the sheer breadth and depth of its analysis — running to all the extant cases.  Ben Wittes is a leading scholar at Brookings in this area and UTexas’s Bobby Chesney is both a leading scholar, and also someone who took on Most Thankless But Important Job in conducting a major review for the Obama administration on detention policy.  Rabea Benhalim is a Brookings Institution Legal Fellow in Governance Studies. I went to Ben and Bobby, and asked if they would give me a guest post on the background to this report and their purposes in researching and writing it, and I would like to thank them for the short response below (cross posted to Volokh): Guest post from Benjamin Wittes, Robert Chesney, and Rabea Benhalim:
President Obama’s decision not to seek additional legislative authority for detentions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—combined with Congress’s lack of interest in the task—means that, for good or for ill, judges through their exercise of habeas jurisdiction are writing the substantive and procedural rules governing military detention of terrorist suspects.  Our purpose in this report is to describe in detail and analyze the courts’ work to date—and thus map the contours of the nascent law of military detention that is emerging from it.
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22 Jan

Over the last few days I learned a valuable lesson: irony and satire do not work. I thought my contribution on soft statehood was written with my tongue so far in my cheek that it risked coming out of my ear; I thought I had piled on the layers of irony so richly that had my contribution been a pastry,...

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21 Jan

The American Branch of the International Law Association has posted a call for panels for the 2010 International Law Weekend, which will take place in New York October 21-23. This year's theme is "International Law and Institutions: Advancing Justice, Security and Prosperity." ILW is always a fun event -- with lots of student, NGO, IO and private...

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