In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

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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05 Aug

Okay, so Medellin himself is going down. But as Julian highlights above, Texas has now undertaken to extend some sort of review and reconsideration to others covered by the Avena judgment. Why the quiet retreat? Here's some totally unsupported speculation: this is the result of a deal between Texas and Mexico. The GOM is sophisticated enough to understand...

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05 Aug

Almost buried amid the last-minute flurry of litigation over Medellin's pending execution tonight at 7 p.m. EDT, Texas has made a potentially important but ambiguous concession to the ICJ.  It has agreed to support federal habeas petitions in the future for Mexican citizens arguing that a failure of consular notification had caused prejudice to their criminal conviction and death sentence....

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04 Aug

Greg Fox of Wayne State University Law School has posted a new article on SSRN that examines the proposed US/Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) from a unique angle. Discussions in U.S. academic journals and blogs have tended to focus on the constitutionality under U.S. law of the Administration pursuing the completion of a long-term security arrangement with Iraq under...

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