In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

08 Oct

By a vote of 77 for, 6 against, and 74 abstaining, the UN General Assembly has referred to the ICJ the following question: Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law? The draft resolution submitted by Serbia is here. According to the BBC, the US voted against the resolution, arguing that it was...

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07 Oct

Last month, I mentioned that a BBC survey found nearly global support for Obama over McCain.  Now check out this "global electoral college" map put together by the editors of The Economist, Sarah Palin's favorite magazine: [caption id="attachment_4918" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption=""][/caption] The lonely red country is, not suprisingly, Georgia.  And the only pink country appears to be Macedonia. Hat-Tip: FP Passport....

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02 Oct

Friends and readers of Opinio Juris pass along the following conference announcements from Southern Methodist University/Dedman Law School (11/7: "The Rise of Transnational Networks") and Washburn University Law School (11/13-14 "Rule of Law and the Global War on Terrorism: Detainees, Interrogations, and Military Commissions").  They both look terrific (one even features one OJ blogger and several OJ alums!) so check...

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02 Oct

Sarah Palin in last night's debate: America is in a position to help. What I've done in my position to help, as the governor of a state that's pretty rich in natural resources, we have a $40 billion investment fund, a savings fund called the Alaska Permanent Fund. When I and others in the legislature found out we had some millions of dollars...

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01 Oct

I think so, even though it's not obviously consistent with the requirement restricting presidential eligibility to "natural born" citizens.  I make the case in this essay, just posted as part of a symposium on McCain's constitutional eligibility (in light of his Canal Zone birth) at the Michigan Law Review's online First Impressions (with other contributions from Jack Chin, Larry Solum, Daniel Tokaji,...

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30 Sep

I think it’s over. As is true with notational wars, it takes another, more serious threat to take care of the displacement. The end isn’t in the way of armistice or surrender. The wars on drugs and crime continue to be fought under more prosaic headings, but they no longer have a hold on the national imagination. And in the...

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28 Sep

With all the attention to the bailout legislation last week, few noticed how much the Senate did on the treaty front.  But, as I suggested in my recent post, the Senate had an opportuntity to set a record in terms of its treaty actions and it easily did so, passing resolutions of advice and consent for some 78 treaties (the whole list can be...

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26 Sep

"I, for one, cannot think of anything more presidential than suspending your presidential campaign! Being president demands suspending all kinds of things: habeas corpus, Gitmo prisoners...

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26 Sep

Here's the latest: the Western Climate Initiative among seven US governors and four Canadian provincial premiers, takes shape to create a market-based cap-and-trade emissions reduction program (report here from the NY Times). The program emerges from the terms of this February 2007 agreement.  Leaving aside the question of whether this qualifies as a compact (sure looks like one), are this and similar undertakings...

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25 Sep

Noah Feldman has this long think piece in the New York Times Magazine.  Feldman deftly describes for an intelligent lay audience a fork-in-the-road moment for the Court and its posture towards international law and institutions.  We have the sovereigntists on the one hand and the internationalists on the other.  Each had a major win last Term, the internationalists with Boumediene...

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20 Sep

The letters section of the Times is probably not long for the world but it does still have the function of pulling out pithy representative statements from what would otherwise be lost in the haystack of the paper's website comments section.  So here's this from Northwestern University lawprof Steve Calabresi on Adam Liptak's excellent piece from Friday on the flagging international stature of...

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18 Sep

The oft-discussed relationship of the United States and International Law will be the theme of this year's International Law Weekend of the American Branch of the International Law Association.  The conference will be held October 16-18, 2008, at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 42 West 44th Street, New York City.  The kick-off panel will focus...

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