In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

26 Nov

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,...

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24 Nov

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?...

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23 Nov

'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...

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21 Nov

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...

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20 Nov

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...

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20 Nov

[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...

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19 Nov

The Asian Society of International Law announces the "Second Biennial General Conference of the Asian Society of International Law," at the University of Tokyo, August 1-2, 2009, which takes up the important issue of Asia’s relationship with the international legal order under the main theme of “International Law in a Multi-polar and Multi-civilizational World – Asian Perspectives, Challenges and Contributions.” The...

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19 Nov

Despite the title of his post, I do not read Chris Borgen as a natural law skeptic! He accepts the existence of norms and principles that must be explained by theories other than positivism. He is just skeptical about the standard approach to explaining the source of natural law, namely, the use of the concept of the common...

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18 Nov

At risk of distracting us too soon from the merits vel non of natural law, I wanted to take up another piece of Mary Ellen’s account – namely, her fairly positive outlook on the prospects of domestic court enforcement of international law. Despite the subject matter’s placement in the very last chapter of the book, Mary Ellen I think rightly notes:...

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18 Nov

In working through an explanation for the source of international law’s authority in the international community, Mary Ellen O’Connell describes the important role of positive law but also shows its limits. For example, it is very hard to imagine a serious contention that it is somehow possible to legalize genocide or slavery through the mere fact of enacting positive law....

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