TaxProfBlog has posted a chart with the visitor and page view ranks for law professor blogs for the last quarter. Our Very Own Opinio Juris is ranked number 19th in visitors. Of course, we like to think that it is the quality, rather than the quantity, of our visitors that matters. And we do thank you for coming by. However, I...
Francis Fukuyama, one of the leading intellectual lights of American conservatism, has endorsed Barack Obama in a short essay in the (aptly titled) magazine The American Conservative: I’m voting for Barack Obama this November for a very simple reason. It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush. It was bad enough that he launched an unnecessary war...
I have no idea whether this report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz is accurate: French President Nicolas Sarkozy is very critical of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama's positions on Iran, according to reports that have reached Israel's government. Sarkozy has made his criticisms only in closed forums in France. But according to a senior Israeli government source, the reports reaching Israel indicate...
Article XX(a) of the GATT allows countries to violate WTO rules if doing so is “necessary to protect public morals.” The “public morals” exception is notoriously elusive, with only one WTO case—the US-Gambling Services case—clarifying the scope of the exception. So in a real sense we don’t really know when “public morals” can or cannot be invoked. ...
Career diplomat Nicholas Burns has an essay in Newsweek on the whole "negotiate with adversaries" kerfuffle. (Yeah, I said "kerfuffle" because that's about all it deserves.) He begins: One of the sharpest and most telling differences on foreign policy between Barack Obama and John McCain is whether the United States should talk to difficult and disreputable leaders like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
Sundays are a bit slow around OJ, so I thought I might offer (unless my confreres think it too far off topic) a series of indeterminate run, Sundays with Stendhal, featuring quotes from various works of the master. Stendhal was a diplomat in much of his career, a figure of a transborder European elite culture, and is also a figure...
Take five minutes out of your busy day and watch this interview, which would be hysterical if it was a Saturday Night Live send-up of an interview by a conservative newscaster, but is just sad because it's real. Notice how little the interviewer -- who is clearly animatronic and programmed by Powerline and Hugh Hewitt -- knows about "socialism" and...
Over at the excellent polls/politics site FiveThirtyEight, Sean Quinn describes an Obama volunteer working doors in Virginia: Back in Charlottesville, we encountered Alex Englehard, a German from Heidelberg pursuing his legal degree and on break after his fifth-year exams. Englehard, a dedicated full-time Obama volunteer, said many Americans "don't realize how big an impact this one election has on the rest of...
In a sign of increasing election-eve desperation on the Right, respectable Republicans (Andrew McCarthy, for one) appear now to be taking seriously the argument that Obama does not meet constitutional eligibility requirements for the presidency. A suit has been filed in Pennsylvania seeking declarative relief to that effect, on two grounds: 1) he was born not in Hawaii but...
One of the most important Alien Tort Statute cases has begun in California that will test the scope of corporate liability under international law. The facts are hotly disputed but either version is truly bizarre. Over 100 Nigerians seize a Chevron oil platform on May 25, 1998. Plaintiffs argue that it was a peaceful nonviolent act of...
I have been a big fan of Andrew Sullivan's writing for a couple of decades (since his TNR days), and have read his blog pretty regularly for the past four years. He has an interesting essay up at The Atlantic's newly redesigned site, "Why I Blog." From the intro: This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely...
