If you have any interest in Second Life, you should check out the transcript of Richard Posner's presentation in the virtual world earlier this month. It includes substantive discussion on topics such as terrorism, torture, intellectual property, and the virtual economy. He also suggests that we are not too far from an "international law of virtual worlds." But...
A number of years ago, I visited the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The museum was strangely deserted; the only other visitors my friend and I saw were a young African-American family. Social animals that humans are, the four of us wandered the museum near to each other, although we never spoke. After about an hour,...
In news worthy of the Onion, here are a few stories circulating around the world about the global perils of Christmas: 1. According to a recent survey of Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas, just under one-third of all Santas have been urinated on by children, 60 percent have been coughed and sneezed on, and close to 90 percent have...
See the story here. The French city of St Denis has named a street after Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose 1982 conviction on murder charges continues to generate controversy. The street naming was condemned in a recent congressional resolution, putting Philadelphia representative and now-mayoral candidate Chaka Fattah in something of a hot seat (he did vote in favor of the...
I must say I was a bit taken aback by Time's selection of "You" for Person of the Year Award. Here is how they put it in their cover story. "...
I just saw this report from last week released by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs laying out the legal case for seeking the prosecution of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for inciting genocide against Jews and Israel. The report has some impressive names attached to it, most notably to me anyway, is Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel (hat tip Jeff...
Peter Rutledge, a lawprof at Catholic University Law School and a sometime correspondent to Opinio Juris on subjects like the NAFTA Chapter 19 litigation, has, together with Gary Born of Wilmer Hale, recently published the fourth edition of a treatise on International Civil Litigation in the United States. This topic, always a complicated one, is now an enormous...
For those of you who don't read Balkinization -- and you should! -- Brian Tamanaha has a wonderful post on the Wizard of Oz, which, it turns out, is actually a political allegory about the debate over gold and silver. Who knew? ...
The D.C. Circuit rendered an interesting decision in The Fund for Animals, Inc. v. Kempthorne on the interpretation of a federal statute regulating mute swans, a non-native species of migratory birds. At issue is whether the statute and relevant treaties prohibit the hunting and killing of mute swans. The State of Maryland wishes to reduce the population of...
Religion has always been at the cutting edge of transnational association, and that's proving as true today with this story: breakaway elements of the US episcopal church are putting themselves under the jurisdiction (if that's the appropriate vocabulary) of more conservative Anglican churches in Africa. Earlier this week it was several Northern Virginia parishes which aligned themselves with the...
David Kaye and K. Russell LaMotte (along with illustrator Peter Hoey) argue in a recent NY Times op-ed that one way the new Congress can attempt to gain back some of the international good-will that the U.S. has lost is to approve some of the many treaties that have been submitted by a President but are currently languishing. They explain:The...
Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman have just published an interesting article, The Jeffersonian Treaty Clause, in the University of Illinois Law Review. In a direct, originalist challenge to Missouri v. Holland, the article argues that the treaty power is limited by inherent structural limitations on executive power. Here is the abstract: The Treaty Clause of the federal Constitution declares that...
