In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

04 Sep

Tom Farer's 'Latin Americanization' thesis deserves comment; i.e. that recent anti-terrorism / Guantanamo  measures by the Bush administration are comparable to tactics that certain authoritarian Latin American regimes undertook, in that (i) states of emergency were proclaimed in conjunction with incursions on human rights, and that (ii) neither judicial nor congressional oversight effectively limited the executive's power. The analogy between the current US administration's behavior towards terrorism...

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03 Sep

In his opening post and in the opening chapter of his book, Tom Farer gives us a tour of the horizon of how international law and self-interest interact in American foreign policy thinking. He paints a picture which focuses on a struggle between two different views of America's role in the world, the Liberal view and the Neocon view. In this...

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03 Sep

Let me begin the discussion by addressing one of the most important issues addressed in Farer's book: combating terrorism consistent with the Charter. Farer presents the issue of the permissible options for the United States if it discovers that terrorist organizations or individuals are active in country X and planning an attack on American targets. If the...

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01 Sep

Turns out (along with who knows what else) that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, active enough to have attended its statewide convention in 1994. The party argues that Alaska's accession by referendum in 1958 violated international law, insofar as voters were not given the choice of independence in addition to the ballot options of statehood or continued status...

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25 Aug

Some hard-working soul on the Democratic vice presidential vetting team had to make her way through a law review article Joe Biden co-authored in the late 1980's on constitutional war powers. The piece is pretty safe stuff, advocating a "joint decision model" for use-of-force decisionmaking. In the course of proposing some tinkering with the War Powers Resolution, there is this...

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21 Aug

     Franck Fife/AFP via MSNBC    As we've learned from our expert guest-bloggers, there are disputes arising out of the Olympics, and then there are DISPUTES.   The reported International Olympic Committee investigation into the age of Chinese gymnast and gold medalist He Kexin （何可欣） qualifies as the type of DISPUTE that could really get ugly. Why? Because a big part of the investigation...

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20 Aug

There is nothing international law specific about this pedagogically-oriented post.  But as the new fall semester begins for many readers of this blog, I am curious about where OJ readers stand on the question of limiting or prohibiting laptop use or internet access in classrooms.  I have written on my regular blog about this topic, as have many other professors....

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20 Aug

The Language Trainers Group has a great new on-line game: trying to guess what country 16 people with different accents are from.  It's called, not surprisingly, Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From? I scored a 28 -- a full 10 points higher than Blake Hounsell, who tipped me off to the game at FP Blog. And yes, I could...

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12 Aug

With the announcement of a six-point plan for a Georgian cease-fire, attention is shifting to how to construct a durable and equitable peace in the Caucasus. As the parties settle-in for some sort of negotiation, I find it interesting how the ideas about international law and norms are used in the statements of the parties.  Here are a couple of examples from a CNN...

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12 Aug

Almost a decade ago, Tom Friedman famously scoffed at the idea of a "Microsoft Navy" defending the shipping lanes of the Pacific.  But technology has a way of moving us in unforeseen directions, raising the possibility not just of aggressive cyberwarfare, but of cyber-defense forces.  So, when hackers (allegedly Russian in origin) took down Civil.ge, the official English-language official Georgian news cite, Georgia turned to Google Blogspot...

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10 Aug

We don’t insist that our major-league ball players come from the cities that they play for. Why should we demand any more from Olympic athletes? The Beijing Games includes more athletes with tenuous ties to the country whose flag they followed into Friday’s opening ceremonies. There are some who have jumped states in search of better-funded Olympic programs. Others couldn't...

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