In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

27 Jul

A century ago the presidential race between Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan was consumed by the question of whether "the Constitution follows the flag." The United States had just acquired several overseas colonies in the wake of the Spanish-American War. The Democratic Party platform of 1900 declared that “We hold that the Constitution follows the flag, and...

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26 Jul

Recently, advocates for asylum seekers fleeing severe and state-sanctioned domestic violence in their home countries appeared to score a significant victory. In the case of a woman who requested asylum based on fears she would be murdered by her common-law husband in Mexico, the Department of Homeland Security filed a brief in April (unsealed recently as reported by the...

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24 Jul

The Rwandan government announced today that it will stop taking new gacaca cases as of July 31st and that it intends to wind down gacaca operations within five months. Gacaca is a traditional local justice procedure (gacaca roughly means “justice on the grass” in Kinyarwanda) that the government modified to process the staggering number of low-level genocide cases and...

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24 Jul

For critics of universal jurisdiction, Spain's UJ statute has become the poster child for accusations of excess. How strange it seems that roughly ten years ago it was so widely celebrated as the provision that brought down General Augusto Pinochet. Spain's indicting the former Chilean dictator and Britain's detaining him on the attendant arrest warrant and extradition request...

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23 Jul

According to a national poll conducted by Time, now that Walter Cronkite is dead, John Stewart is America's most trusted newscaster.  Stewart, 44%.  Brian Williams, 29%.  Charlie Gibson, 19%.  Katie Couric: 7%. (I guess I shouldn't mock.  If those were the choices, I'd have voted for him, too.)...

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22 Jul

You probably know which blogs have the most traffic from Paul Caron’s “Law Prof Blog Rankings.” But I bet you have no idea which law blogs are the best read, that is, the ones that have “sticky” readership. If you take Paul Caron’s Top Law Prof Blog rankings and rank the blogs based on the “average visit length”...

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22 Jul

Related to my post yesterday about the presence requirement for invoking universal jurisdiction (with respect to the UK's new genocide law amendment), QC Ken Macdonald (visiting professor at the London School of Economics) has proposed in The Times an interesting possible solution to deal with what I would call the "Colin Powell" (or, per Macdonald, "Henry Kissinger") dilemma: Of course a...

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