I take Deborah's point in our conversation below on the administrative detention point, and think she is probably being a little bit nicer to me than I deserve in suggesting that I am running together two things - law and policy. Fair point, and although I might return to it sometime next year (if I can persuade myself to assign...
For the last few weeks, popular culture has become reacquainted with the less romantic side of piracy. (For the romantic side, picture my 2 year old running around my living room -- yes, this Thanksgiving morning -- dressed with eye patch, bandana, "puffy pants" and a plastic sword yelling "arrgh" at the top of his lungs.) But, with seizures of...
Thanks Ken. Let me try to clarify again. On one level, you’re quite right: many human rights advocates believe a new system of administrative detention – beyond the criminal law and beyond the Geneva regime – is not a good idea as a matter of policy. (I hasten to add many who are not human rights advocates think...
With apologies for arriving late to the helpful Hakimi-Waxman-Anderson exchange, I thought it worth noting the apparent consensus on at least one position I, too, share: there is no categorical international law prohibition on “administrative” (or otherwise non-criminal) detention. Indeed, at risk of repeating myself, I’m not sure I could name a human rights or humanitarian law scholar I...
Michael Goldhaber at the Amlaw Daily is unconvinced. Drawing from some of the data discussed at last week's ASIL-Harvard Law School conference on Globalization of the Legal Profession, Golhaber summarizes the presentations at HLS, crunches the numbers, and looks at the dangers lurking (or already arrived) for firms staking their futures on emerging markets: James Jones, who chairs the Hildebrandt Institute,...
I have posted a new essay on SSRN, a draft chapter of a book that Markus Dubber and I are editing for Stanford University Press entitled "The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law." In addition to my chapter, which is something of an outlier, the book contains 17 chapters on the substantive criminal law of individual countries. We have attempted to...
The University of Auckland magazine recently published a copy of the university's 1918 final exam in public international law. I have only the vaguest recollection of the exam I took, but I it wasn't this hard. (Exhibit A: I didn't fail.) Have academic standards really declined so precipitously? How would you fare, readers?...
'The Marquis does not like bloggers, I warn you; it is his one antipathy,' the Abbe Pirard said to Julien. 'Know Latin, Greek if you can, the history of the Egyptians, of the Persians, and so forth; he will honour you and protect you as a scholar. But do not go and post a single page in French, especially upon...
On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris I would like to thank Mary Ellen O’Connell having joined us this week in our second Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris book symposium for a discussion of her new book, The Power and Purpose of International Law. We would also like to thank Beth Simmons for joining us as a guest commentor. Thanks also to everyone who posted comments...
The power of international law comes from our belief in it and the purposes it serves: the promotion of peace, human rights, prosperity and the natural environment. Beth Simmons in her thoughtful and well-written post suggests that we need empirical evidence of this belief. There is, however, plenty of evidence—indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, if not categorized and precisely quantified. We...
[caption id="attachment_5673" align="alignright" width="176" caption="Prof. Joel Trachtman"][/caption] Back in 2005 when Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner published their book, The Limits of International Law, they garnered a lot of attention for promoting the application of rational choice theory to international law (IL), and, equally importantly, suggesting that this method showed IL to have much less influence than conventional wisdom suggested. And the...
One of the most interesting jurisprudential aspects of The Power and Purpose of International Law is its explicit use of Hans Kelsen. I am among those Americans for whom Kelsen is a mostly forgotten figure in jurisprudence - and I realized reading this book that, while I have probably read much more than most American legal scholars of his jurisprudential...
