It's not often that an NPR show features treaties, but last week, Ira Glass of This American Life, had a fascinating story about the US-Canada International Boundary Commission (listen to Act 1). In short, he recounts a fight between a Bush-appointed commissioner Dennis Schornack and the Justice Department over the application of a series of treaties between the United...
NY Times reporter Eric Lichtblau has published an account of DOJ during the Bush years, Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice, which we can add to the growing shelf of books looking at the legal aspects of Bush Administration national security policy. It mostly hews to the formula: bad things done, people hurt, the Constitution trashed. The book...
If you will indulge a serious post about human suffering, I wanted to pass on Harvard Law Professor Bill Stuntz’s wonderful reflections on his struggle with cancer. I think it is appropriate for this blog because he reflects upon human suffering throughout the world, and emphasizes the irony that only those living in privileged, rich countries think they should...
As this essay in the invaluable Institute for War and Peace Studies argues, a debate over the final location of the ICTY's documentary archives is missing the point. The archive of the ICTY is a vast and invaluable collection, and its holdings will be indispensible for anyone researching or investigating events of the 1990s, in any former Yugoslav republic. But most...
They're both participants in the reconquista, illegal immigrants as the foot soldiers and now a vodka purveyor as its cartographer. Entertaining little dust-up over this ad from Absolut, depicting (very roughly) Mexico along the lines of its early 19th century boundaries. The ad was targeted at Mexican consumers, "based upon historical perspectives and ...
Steve Ratner has a nice turn at the "Think Again" column in the latest Foreign Policy (teaser here - let this be a good reason to subscribe). Steve takes on various elements of the popular conventional wisdom on the Geneva Conventions, including the line that they are obsolete:The conventions won’t prevent wars—they were never intended to—but they can and...
This among his useful suggestions as to how to fix the errors of Bush in anti-terror policy in a Slate column last week:• Work with allies to establish an international legal framework for terrorists. Last week, John McCain called for a "new international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control." This is a good idea, not because...
Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway had this op-ed in Saturday's WaPo arguing that congressional authorization for the Iraq deployment will expire with official the UN mandate for the multinational force come January 1, 2009. The piece works from the limitation in Congress' 2002 joint resolution approving the use of force only to "(1) defend the national security of the...
Russia's lower house of Parliament has passed a resolution denying that the Soviet Union committed "genocide" in Ukraine during the 1930s. The resolution states: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its victims were million of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the...
Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski declared in a speech today that the First Amendment is dead. In a keynote speech entitled “The Late, Great First Amendment” given at a Pepperdine Law Review symposium, Kozinski offered a detailed analysis of the consequences of the Internet age for First Amendment jurisprudence. I’m sure that Eugene Volokh, Jack Balkin and...
For those interested in international arbitration, the ASIL and the Institute for Transnational Arbitration will be hosting a one-day conference on Wednesday, April 9 in Washington, D.C. The topic is "Soft Law Instruments in International Arbitration." The schedule is available here. Plenty of big names from the world of international arbitration, including David Caron, Michael Reisman, James...
The ICTY has acquitted Ramush Haradinaj, a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and a former Kosovo prime minister, of committing war crimes during the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict with Serbia. (Official press release is here). In giving its judgment, the ICTY Chamber went out of its way to complain about how many witnesses for the prosecution were...
