We interrupt the regularly scheduled Sundays with Stendhal to raise an issue of crucial importance, at least for OJ readers in the northern hemisphere above a certain latitude ...
The great Irish intellectual, scholar, and diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien has died. Although for many OJ readers, he is remembered most as a diplomat - at the center of the United Nations and the Congo Crisis of 1961 - his greatest influence on me was through his massive study of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody. One passage that O'Brien cited...
No, I don't mean Obama's foreign policy. The Foreign Relations of the United States is the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity; and these days it's in trouble. The tip of the iceberg is the fracas described here and here between the Historian of the Department of State Marc Susser and the Advisory Committee on...
I received in the mail a couple of days ago an author copy of the journal International History Review. I have a short piece in the December 2008 issue, a brief review of Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International. To be honest, I had not heard of the IHR before I accepted the assignment, but I was...
This past Friday I was privileged to host an intimate colloquium at Pepperdine’s Malibu Beach House that brought together a wonderful mix of torts scholars, international law scholars, and practitioners to address the nexus between torts and the Alien Tort Statute. It was an eclectic group, including renown torts experts such as Third Restatement Reporter Michael Green, Anthony Sebok,...
Richard Falk, an eminent professor of international law and politics at Princeton, was expelled from Israel yesterday while he acting as the UN Human Rights Council's special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories. Falk was expelled by Israel because Israel believed his investigation, and indeed the UN Human Rights Council itself, is irredeemably biased against Israel. This is probably...
So long as you did not speak lightly of God, or of the clergy, or of the King, or of the men in power, or of the artists patronised by the court, or of anything established; so long as you did not say anything good of Berenger, or of the opposition press, or of Voltaire, or of Rousseau, or of...
According to Sitemeter we broke the one million visit mark this week. (However, I don't think this metric includes all of you who read this site via a feed, e-mail, etc...
They're not calling it that, but on April 24, 2009, Yale Law School is sponsoring a conference, Realistic Idealism in International Law, in honor of international law-giant W. Michael Reisman. Here's an excerpt from the conference announcement: Professor Reisman is the Myres S. McDougal Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, where he has been on the faculty since 1965....
As you probably know, the hugely distinguished Professor Christopher Greenwood of the LSE has joined the ICJ, thus occasioning the following job notice by the LSE (and many thanks to the great International Law Reports blog): The Department of Law, a world-leading centre for research and teaching in legal studies and interdisciplinary approaches to law, seeks to appoint a new Professor...
The European Journal of International Law has started a blog EJIL:Talk!, which promises to be an influential addition to the international legal blogosphere. In an introductory e-mail, JHH Weiler, the EJIL Editor in Chief wrote: The decision to experiment with a blog – and an experiment it is – was decidedly not a bandwagon effect – they all have it, so should...
After several months of application kept up at every moment, Julien still had the air of a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and opening his lips did not reveal an implicit faith ready to believe everything and to uphold everything, even by martyrdom. It was with anger that Julien saw himself surpassed in this respect by the most...
