Douglas Burgess has this take in Legal Affairs. He argues the Declaration of Paris offers a good model for a potential international treaty defining the crime of terrorism:TO UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL OF DEFINING TERRORISM as a species of piracy, consider the words of the 16th-century jurist Alberico Gentili's De jure belli: "Pirates are common enemies, and they are attacked...
To relatively little notice, the proposed European Constitution has garnered several more approvals this summer, following the well-publicized French and Dutch rejections in late May/early June. Latvia, Cyprus and Malta ratified it by parliamentary vote on June 2, June 30, and July 6, respectively. And, in the first popular referendum since the French and Dutch elections, on July 10 voters...
I want to welcome Elizabeth Kandravy Cassidy to Opinio Juris. Elizabeth is an American attorney currently living in Geneva who will offer a comparativist perspective to our musings. She has taught comparative and constitutional law overseas (Univ. of Namibia) and employment, gender and family law in the US (Princeton and Seton Hall). Over the next two weeks she will be...
For months, the Bush administration has relied on its own legal analysis (bolstered now by the DC Circuit's opinion in Hamdan) that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to detainees in Guantanamo. Nonetheless, President Bush claimed in 2002 that, despite this legal conclusion, all detainees in custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere would be treated "humanely" and consistent with the principles...
In the midst of the pre-confirmation feeding frenzy over Judge John Roberts, it is worth considering (okay, wildy speculating about) how he would approach the use of foreign judicial opinions, legal sources and the more complex questions about how international law is brought into effect through the federal courts. If, as the FT op-ed by David Garrow suggests, Roberts will...
My St. John's colleague Brian Tamanaha has an interesting post at Balikinization about the World Tribunal on Iraq and "legal niceties."...
The Iraqi Special Tribunal, constituted to try Saddam Hussein and members of his former government, announced Sunday that the first case against Saddam had been referred for trial. The referral is akin to indictment in the US criminal justice system, and will allow the trial to be scheduled. The first case involves Saddam's massacre of over 150 Shiites in Dujyal...
Marty Lederman has posted this excellent analysis of the Hamdan case over at Balkinzation.com. As Julian pointed out in his original post, the DC Circuit's conclusion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the current conflict with al Qaeda is vulnerable on appeal to the Supreme Court. Lederman probes deeper into the question of whether Common Art. 3 of...
My blogging will be very light over the next two weeks as my wife and I retreat to a more or less undisclosed foreign location. We'll see whether I can stay away for long...
It looks like Justice O'Connor is not going to slow down much in retirement. As this article notes, she spent last week attending a conference of the Central and Eastern European Legal Initative (CEELI) in Istanbul. Apparently, Justice O'Connor is passionate about building and promoting independent judiciaries in the former Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union. Interestingly, she herself...
As I predicted back in April, a panel of the D.C. Circuit unanimously rejected constitutional and treaty-based challenges to a trial of alleged terrorists by military commission. The decision reversed a lower court's finding that the whole military commission system is a violation of the Geneva Convention. The D.C. Circuit's key holdings:The Sept 11 Resolution for the Authorization of the...
This week Japan granted undersea gas drilling rights to an area also claimed by China. This is a separate dispute from Japan's attempt to convert a rock into a Tokyo address. But it is another serious irritant in what is an increasingly contentious and dangerous relationship.Why can't Japan and China agree to submit their dispute to the ICJ like Benin...
