This past September, I was a speaker at a conference on Law, Ethics and the War on Terror that was organized by Geoff Corn at the South Texas College of Law. The conference is now available as a video-stream. Part one is here and part two is here. The other panelists were incredibly impressive including senior military officials, prominent defense attorneys, and academics...
Remember the halcyon days of the election when Obama was a socialist and a marxist? Well, funny thing. According to the RNC, he's actually a moderate Republican: In all, with Barack Obama's promises to cut taxes, merit pay for public school teachers, and renewed offshore drilling, I would say he simply ran the most successful moderate Republican presidential campaign since Dwight...
I'm hopping on a plane shortly, so I can't fill this out as I'd like. And anyway, it is probably too early to say very much other than to note the question, which is this. Peter and others have claimed the Obama election as something for the world, and even as (maybe, with many qualifications, etc., etc.), sort of honorary president...
Or should that be President of the World? The global reactions have been overwhelming, not the least because Obama carries in himself a mixed global identity. As Philippe Sands put it: “People feel he is a part of them because he has this multiracial, multiethnic and multinational dimension. He represents, for people in so many different communities and cultures, a...
from someone who supported the other guy. It is a great day for this country, and one of the things that makes and keeps the United States great is that Barack Obama will be my president too. I remember asking someone in the Georgian civil wars why this was all worth a civil war, why not an election - he...
Obama has an aunt who is present in the United States in violation of the immigration laws. So what? Lots of American citizens and legal immigrants have undocumented alien family members. See this report from the Urban Institute on so-called mixed-status families, that is, nuclear families in which some members are citizens, some not. For example, the study estimates that...
At risk of exhibiting the same cynicism of which Stendhal himself was accused, a famous passage on politics and newspapers and literature from The Red and the Black, Book Two, chapter 52, "The Discussion": Here the author would have liked to insert a page of dots. 'That will not look pretty,' says the publisher, 'and for so frivolous a work not...
As we enter in the election home-stretch, there have been some tit-for-tat allegations about foreign money ending up in presidential candidate coffers. The GOP has filed this complaint with the FEC alleging Obama to have accepted more than $30 million in questionable donations (the document cites a speech by Libya's Moammar Ghadafi for support). Obama has returned the...
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...
