General

LOAC Conference at Catholic University, DC, Friday April 23

If you are going to be in DC on Friday, April 23, there will be a terrific law of armed conflict program all day at Catholic University, Columbus Law School, including Harold Koh as lunchtime keynote speaker and a host of luminaries on the panels.  Advance registration required.  See program details below the fold. Controversy and Developments in the Law of Armed Conflict: Customary vs Treaty Law; Law of the Sea Manual; Manual on International Law Applicable to Air and Missile Warfare Friday, April 23, 2010 The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law Washington, DC 20064 This program will examine three important efforts relating to International Humanitarian Law: the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea, the more recent Commentary and Manual on International Law Applicable to Air and Missile Warfare (prepared by the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research), and the ICRC's multi-volume study on Customary International Humanitarian Law. To what extent do the manuals reflect state practice, and what role do such manuals play in the formulation and application of customary international humanitarian law?  Panels of international law experts and practitioners will discuss these important issues in a format designed to encourage lively debate, and to draw conclusions based both on scholarly treatises and the actual practice of states.

Call for Papers: Foucault and International Law

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...

More on Baltasar Garzon

Alas, I don't agree with very much of KJH's critique of Eric Posner's Wall Street Journal opinion piece last week - Eric commenting on the suspension of Spain's crusading universal jurisdictionalist judge, Baltasar Garzon.  However, rather than get back into that, I wanted to flag instead Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell's comment on the subject.

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.

Did Obama “Bungle” His Sudan Policy?

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...

The Vatican’s (and the Pope’s) Immunity from Legal Action in the UK

Dapo Akande over at EJIL Talk! has a pretty persuasive argument in favor of the Vatican's status as a state under international law, and therefore, the Pope's right to head of state immunity.  Moreover, in the UK, the courts (like in the US) are bound to accept the determination of the foreign ministry as to individuals entitled to head of...

A Response to Robert Bird and Peggy Chaudhry by David Orozco

[David Orozco is an Assistant Professor of Business Law at Michigan Technical University] Professors Bird and Chaudhry provide an insightful and timely analysis of European Law related to the repackaging and relabeling of grey goods, specifically pharmaceutical products. The analysis navigates readers through the morass of legal confusion and uncertainty in this area of international law. A couple of questions were...

John Bellinger on Continuity and Change in Detention Policy

Former DOS Legal Adviser (and a path-breaking guest blogger here at OJ when in that role a couple of years ago) John Bellinger has a short opinion column out at the CFR site, April 14, 2010 (corrected link, I hope!), discussing continuity and change in US detention policy on counterterrorism.  John takes up a range of issues, from trials to...

Changes in the U.S. News International Law Rankings?

Today, U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR) officially released its 2011 rankings of American law schools.  This, in turn, led the legal blogosphere into its annual love-hate dance with the "overall" rankings--pouring over every move up or down the ladder, while simultaneously denouncing the ranking's methodology and utility.  Lest our readers feel left out, I thought I'd flag the "new" International Law rankings that...

A Response to Ingrid Wuerth

Many thanks to Ingrid Wuerth for her thoughtful response to my Article. I agree with Ingrid that the importance of maintaining a uniform international standard in the interpretation of incorporative statutes may be especially salient in the context of treaties, like the Hague Rules, that address coordination problems.  I disagree, however, that the borrowed ...

A Response to John Coyle by Ingrid Wuerth

[Ingrid Wuerth is a Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Law School] This Article by John Coyle focuses on U.S. statutes that incorporate treaties into domestic law. As John defines them, incorporative statutes may include implementing legislation for non-self executing treaties, statutes that facilitate the implementation of self-executing treaties, or congressional executive agreements; the key question is whether they give effect...

The Koh Speech and Targeting an American Citizen

Adam Serwer, a journalist and blogger at the American Prospect, makes this observation in a very interesting post (linked in Robert Wright’s NYT Opinionator column) at the American Prospect Tapped blog (via The Progressive Realist).  (My apologies for interrupting the symposium also; I'll take a backseat now!):

State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh’s speech to the American Society of International Law has mostly been read as a justification of the administration’s use of drone strikes against suspected al-Qaeda targets. With the news that the Obama administration has targetedAmerican-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki for death, I went back to Koh’s explanation for why the drone strikes are legal. It seems to me that his arguments could possibly double as a justification of the government’s authority to kill al-Awlaki without due process.

Serwer then walks back through the text of Legal Adviser Koh’s speech, applying the language about drones to the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki.  He concludes that it could be seen as a justification for that as well.  I think that’s right, and a good observation.