General

I've been on blog-silence the last few months, but one of my students today made me feel a little guilty about my lack of blogging, so I'm back (at least for now).  So while not wanting to interrupt this great online symposium, I'll just point our readers to this remarkable little exchange between U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair...

I would first like to thank Professor Guy Mundlak for generously taking the time to respond to my Article, and Opinio Juris for hosting this forum. Professor Mundlak is very correct to note that over time civil liberties and socioeconomic matters have become more intertwined. What’s more, the overlapping identities and realms in which workers function mean that to be protected...

Thank you to Professor Corn for his exceptionally thoughtful response to the article. His observations illustrate vividly, and persuasively, the apparent choices undergirding the traditional approach my Article critiques. I’ll reply briefly to some of his comments and conclude by highlighting what I perceive to be larger issues in the law of war that our dialogue might provoke. Professor Corn casts...

[Geoffrey Corn is an Associate Professor at South Texas College of Law] Let me begin by extending my compliments to Prof. Watts for his exceptionally well-written article, and my thanks for his suggestion that I provide comment. I am also grateful to my friends at Opinio Juris for extending this opportunity to me—it is nice to be back! CNA obviously represents one...

A note to our readers:  I inadvertently jumped the gun a bit in my earlier post about the Security Council and raised Professor Michael Glennon's YJIL article, The Blank Prose Crime of Aggression, on which Kevin has also commented.  We imagine that some readers will also want to weigh in.  It turns out that in March, we will be discussing...

Cross-posted at Balkinization Ok, the headline is a bit misleading. It’s only two justices – Scalia and Thomas – who, in dissenting from a denial of certiorari by the Supreme Court this week, argued that the Court should settle once and for all whether detainees can invoke the Geneva Conventions in federal court. Lyle Denniston, as usual, reports the dissent-from-denial here,...

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.

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...

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...

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...