In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

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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01 Aug

Executive invocations of foreign affairs as the basis for dismissing otherwise valid litigation doesn't seem to work very well these days.  But there is one area where (thus far) courts have continued to give the U.S. executive essentially complete deference: determinations on immunity for heads of state.  And so it is today in the Federal District Court of D.C.'s decision...

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01 Aug

Well, we never got as far as interrogation or surveillance, but that's okay. This has been a truly exceptional exchange, a model of everything the debate over law and the war on terror too often is not: civil, serious, rigorous, and respectful of the profound difficulty of the issues at hand. Many thanks to all who participated in it and to...

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01 Aug

I want to close by thanking Ben for writing this terrific book, and our hosts here at OJ for sponsoring this discussion.  Before sigining off, however, I want to offer a few predictions and related observations about the road ahead. It appears quite possible that in the near future we will substantially reduce our reliance on military detention for terrorism suspects at...

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01 Aug

I must confess that I've been a bit cowed into silence by the heavyweight detention discussion between Deborah, Marty, and Ben. At the risk of wading in, though, I think Ben's point in his most recent post -- that detention should be based upon "dangerousness in the context of a showing of some significant relationship with groups against which Congress...

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01 Aug

A few final thoughts on detention and Al-Marwallah before we move on to interrogation--a subject on which I'm certain my arguments will provoke no disagreement. ;-) First, a concession: Marty is quite right that there is an ambiguity in the book concerning what the Al-Marwallah example stands for. I had not noticed this until his last post, and it warrants clarification....

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31 Jul

Well, Ben, much as I look forward to dining with you to discuss these issues further, I won't take that bet, because I tend to agree with you that al-Marwalah could be detained under the laws of war themselves, if the evidence could fairly be read, as you suggest, to indicate that he was engaged in combat against coalition forces...

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