Federal courts are often requested pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1782 to assist with discovery in a case before a foreign or international tribunal. Traditionally that has been understood to exclude discovery before international arbitration tribunals. But last week a federal district court cast doubt on that rule. A New Jersey district court in In re Oxus Gold...
[Dan Bodansky, the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law at the University of Georgia Law School, is a leading expert on climate change and is co-editor of the recently published Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law. This post is part of an Opinio Juris ...
[Hari M. Osofsky is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Oregon. She is a regular contributor to IntLawGrrls. This post is part of an Opinio Juris roundtable discussion of the international law dimensions of the Mass. v. EPA decision] The Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA represents a watershed moment in the U.S. dialogue over climate...
A war of words between the newbie presidents of Chile and Peru may send a long-running territorial dispute between those two countries to the International Court of Justice, according to this report. Chilean president Michelle Bachelet remarked on TV that “[i]f Peru decides to go to the international justice courts, then that’s up to them”, Garcia responded just a...
In another sign of how slow the mainstream media moves sometimes, the NYT has an article today discussing an issue that readers of this blog learned about nearly a month ago: the ICJ's strange reluctance to demand access to crucial Yugoslav/Serbian government documents in reaching their judgment in the Bosnia Genocide case. The ICJ's failure to consider such evidence,...
As Julian has noted (see here and here) a federal district court in Washington D.C. last week has dealt a major blow to claims for damages for alleged torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the importance of the case, I wanted to flesh out the decision a little more and provide my own quick thoughts on the case. ...
I happened to be perusing the Yale Law School calendar looking for a link to this seminar when it hit me: it's non-stop international law at YLS. In the month of March there was a featured extra-curricular lecture, presentation, or event about international or foreign law at YLS every single school day of the month: March 1: Dean...
International law is often critiqued for its culture(s) of exclusion--whether it's the ability of sovereign states to shut out NGOs, the move by NGOs to block out Industry Associations, or, on more personal levels, cliques of "in" international lawyers as opposed to those who don't have the right credentials or connections. My colleague Jeff Dunoff has noted one example...
Nancy Rogers, AALS President and Dean of Ohio State Law School, appears to take the law professor blogging phenomenon seriously. For those, like me, who missed her presidential address at the AALS meeting this January, she focused a large portion of her talk on the challenges and opportunities of "e-scholarship" and blogging. Here is an excerpt: I propose that...
As you may remember, last month Peggy, Duncan, and I attended a conference at Yale Law School on the contributions of the New Haven School to international law. In part this was about the policy-oriented jurisprudence associated with Harold Lasswell, Myres McDougal, and Michael Reisman (among others). In part the conference was about the ideas of transnational legal...
A special thanks to Elizabeth Cassidy of UN Watch for her terrific month-long guest blogging stint at Opinio Juris. It was a first for us: guest blogging by an NGO on the ground at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The highlights of Elizabeth's blogging include an excellent summary of the debate over the Darfur resolution,...
There seems to be some resurgence in efforts to use state pension funds to foreign policy ends. California is looking to divest from companies doing business in Iran, and several states have done so with respect to Sudan (now supported by Mia Farrow and Martin Peretz). Are these measures unconstitutional? In February, a federal district court judge struck...
