The 6th Committee of the GA recently finished its first reading of the 66 draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (“RIO”). The draft articles create rules on when international organizations can be held responsible for internationally wrongful acts under international law. In other words, when can international organizations ("IOs") sue or be sued?...
Like many of you over a certain age, I have been thinking a lot about where I was when the Berlin Wall fell: driving with a friend from Montreal to my parents house in New Jersey, listening to dispatches from Berlin over the radio. My father was glued to the television set when we finally pulled in sometime in...
Tommy Crocker, who teaches constitutional law and criminal procedure at the University of South Carolina School of Law, will be guest-blogging with us for the next two weeks. Tommy writes on a variety of issues, including torture and the First Amendment. His work has appeared the UCLA Law Review, the Texas Law Review, Fordham Law Review, and the peer-reviewed Law...
Following up on Ken's post (whose views I totally endorse, by the way), I wanted to flag one UN budgetary issue of particular interest to our readers. As the NYT article details, UN budget negotiators will battle over whether each of the ICJ's 15 judges should have a law clerk. They currently share nine. Former ICJ President Roslyn Higgins made an...
I'm slightly embarrassed to interrupt the flow of the serious academic discussion underway, but I found this a fascinating site. MarineTraffic.com, with a live GoogleEarth map of marine shipping worldwide. This distracted me for half an hour when I was supposed to be re-writing a chapter called ...
I would like to thank Kathy Stone for commenting on my Article and agreeing to participate in this symposium. She has sharply characterized the main arguments of my paper and made two very helpful criticisms. Both of these are great prods for future work. Let me respond to each of these suggestions in turn. Stone is right that I devoted most...
[Katherine V. Stone is a Professor at UCLA School of Law] In Labor Flexibility, Legal Reform and Economic Development, Alvaro Santos presents an analysis and critique of the World Bank's Doing Business indicators for labor regulation. Those indicators have been used to promote an agenda of legal reform dedicated to eliminating worker protections and rights throughout the developing world. Santos presents...
The depths to which the extreme right will sink to oppose offering quality healthcare to all Americans really knows no bounds: Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. P.S. In case you can't read the sign on your computer, it reads “National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany – 1945.”...
[Marc Limon is Counsellor of the Mission of the Government of the Maldives to the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland] As Professor Knox recognises in his paper, international human rights law is essentially concerned with the relationship between an individual and his or her own State. This makes it difficult to usefully leverage human rights law in the context...
My friends David Sloss, Michael Ramsey, and Bill Dodge are the editors of a remarkable forthcoming book on The U.S. Supreme Court and International Law: Continuity or Change?. They have gathered an all-star cast of scholars to address the role of international law in Supreme Court jurisprudence from 1860 to the present. The book will be published by...
Let me thank Mark Drumbl once again for taking the time to provide his thoughtful response to my Article. As Mark and I agree on many points, I will focus on what appears to be the clearest point of difference between us: our respective answers to the practical question of how the ICC should instantiate its complementarity principle. Absent contrary guidance...
[Mark A. Drumbl is a Professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law] In Complementarity in Crisis: Uganda, Alternative Justice, and the International Criminal Court, Professor Alexander Greenawalt strikes a cautionary note. He underscores that the ICC cannot on its own effectively serve transitional justice interests. It needs help. In the end, Sasha concludes that "the Ugandan peace process reveals...
