Considering Sonia Sotomayor's testimony last week from an international law perspective, much seems to have been made about her April speech to the Puerto Rican Chapter of the ACLU. In that speech, she did opine that "ideas have no boundaries," and that "international law and foreign law will be very important in the discussion of how to think about...
It has been a fascinating two weeks blogging here, and I certainly learned a lot. Some outstanding questions I haven't answered, but unfortunately tomorrow I must turn from these duties to more tedious legal tasks -- jury duty. Thank you the OpinioJurists for having me....
Lite-blogging Ken notes the front page WSJ story today, "Swiss Banks Freeze Out US Clients," July 21, 2009. The freeze-out is a response to UBS and its fight with the IRS, which wants information on US taxpayers (not necessarily just citizens). I have two questions, neither of which I will try to answer: First, what is the competitive advantage of a...
As Ken noted, it was my birthday when I started my blogging stint here, and as I wind down my stint here, I''ll observe another birthday. In a few weeks it will be the first anniversary of the Russo-Georgian war, which saw Russia conquere Georgian territory and cement its control on those parts of Georgia it already occupied. I trust...
Cross-posted at Balkinization UPDATE: The task force's interim report is here. A related protocol on how cases to be prosecuted will be handled is here. Thanks SCOTUSblog. Among the many stories out today about the Administration’s decision to postpone the final reports of its task forces on detention and interrogation policy, Isikoff’s in Newsweek and Gerstein’s in Politico seem to...
We extend a warm welcome to Professor Greg Gordon of the University of North Dakota Law School, who will be guest blogging with us over the next two weeks. Professor Gordon specializes in international criminal law, and brings a wealth of actual experience as a war crimes prosecutor at the ICTR and the U.S. Department of Justice to his...
Last week was the deadline to register for upper-level electives at Harvard Law School. There are plenty of exotic foreign and international law school courses to choose from that appear nominally to relate to law. Here is a sample schedule with some notable gems: Monday evenings start the week off with the critically important course entitled...
Academic books that have long quotes in foreign languages and don't provide translations of them -- even in the footnotes. I'm reading Eyal Benevisti's superb The International Law of Occupation, and there is French everywhere. I can usually get the gist (thanks, Mrs. Armour, for being such a good Latin teacher!), but I'm sure I lose the nuance. That is...
John McGinnis and Nicholas Rosenkranz testified last week on the role of foreign and international law to interpret the Constitution. The full transcript of their testimony is here. At the end of his testimony, Rosenkranz raises a point that I think is often neglected in the discussion of constitutional comparativism: the deliberate attempt by other countries to impact our...
Nothing in the Geneva Conventions suggests the remedy for Art. 49(6) transfers is the deportation of the transferred population. In response to my earlier posts, Kevin, Marko and other commenters argued that since the creation of settlements was illegal, the remedy is their undoing, a return to status quo ante. In a discussion with Marko in my previous post,...
Over the last year, Julian and I both participated in a task force on treaties, jointly convened by the American Bar Association and the American Society of International Law. Along with the task force's other members including former guest bloggers like Ed Swaine and Curt Bradley (see the full list here), we've now produced a consensus report. Medellin served as the...
The international insistence on banning natural growth in Israeli settlements is ironic because it is this population that is most clearly legal under the Geneva Convention. After all, babies are born, not “transferred.” The discussion must begin with the text of the Fourth Geneva Convention. We will assume that the Convention applies to the West Bank (the Art. 2 issue), that...
