The organization whose board meeting I'm attending in Prague is the Media Development Loan Fund, and you can see its newly revamped website at mdlf.org. It is a media assistance organization, one that focuses on helping media companies - newspapers, radio, TV, internet - in the emerging market and developing world that provide a sizable amount of quality newsreporting. Unlike...
Omri Casspi has become the first Israeli basketball player to be selected in the first round of the NBA draft. Casspi was drafted #23 by the Sacramento Kings, which also feature players from Spain (Sergio Rodriguez), Argentina (Andres Nocioni), and Slovenia (Beno Udrih). Basketball fans know that Casspi's Israeli team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, is one of the world's best. The team...
Frequent Opinio Juris commentor Patrick O'Donnell has an informative post at Ratio Juris about shari'ah and jurisprudence in Islam. It begins: Having recently introduced the subjects of constitutionalism and democracy vis-à-vis Islam, I thought it would help to say a few basic things about Sharī‘ah and fiqh, in particular as they have bearing upon our concerns about human rights and democracy, concerns of...
The Senate vote was 62-35. Here's the story at Foreign Policy.com....
Eric Posner is putting up two posts on the Koh debates, over at Volokh Conspiracy (first one is here, second is linked to it). I'll be lite-blogging the next little bit, as I have board meetings for a nonprofit private equity fund for the next few days in Europe. I want to start discussing more finance and development finance topics...
Congrats to new Legal Advisor (or almost-Legal Advisor) Harold Koh! And it looks like he will have plenty of stuff to do. Among other things that will be on his agenda: Submitting the Convention on the Rights of the Child to the Senate. According to US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, this is going to happen. At least she...
I have remained largely silent on Harold Koh's confirmation battle, which is probably about the end this week with a vote in the Senate. I assume that Koh will be confirmed (because I don't think the Senate Democrats would hold a vote if they didn't have the votes). And part of me is glad because, as many of this blog's...
Former Bush Sudan envoy and USAID chief Andrew Natsios has a clearheaded, wise, and knowledgeable op-ed today on the prospects for peace in Sudan. He makes a couple of points that lawyers who only think of Sudan as a proving ground for the ICC should keep in mind: 1) Sudan is a tragedy, but it is probably not an ongoing genocide: First,...
Legend has it that the Danes undermined German efforts to persecute Jews in Denmark by acting in solidarity with them by wearing the yellow star. (And yes I know the story is apocryphal). We can't exactly do the same thing today for Iranians, but one small act of solidarity we can do is make it easier for Iranians to...
The US Supreme Court accepted cert this morning in the case of United States v. Comstock; the cert papers can be found at SCOTUSblog and thanks to Jonathan Adler at Volokh for the tip. Volokh Conspiracy has a series of prior posts on the subject, accessible here. The case is a challenge under the Commerce Clause to the post-sentence civil...
Thanks to my research assistant Heather Bourne, I've been reading a few of Judge Sotomayor's cases involving treaties. And although Julian suggested a few weeks ago that Sotomayor might be a closet sovereigntist, at least one case -- her dissent in Croll v. Croll, 229 F.3d 133 (2d Cir. 2000) -- suggests that she has internationalist leanings as well (subject...
Stephen Walt has a fun piece on the International Relations Guide to Parenting. Here's a taste: [N]o parent can monitor everything a child does (and you'd end up with a pretty neurotic kid if you tried), and you eventually reach a point where physical restraint (in IR terms, "pure defense") isn't practical. So we all rely on deterrence -- "if...
