I had the pleasure of participating on a panel a couple of weeks ago on Presidential War Powers, in light of the recent proposal to authorize the use of force against ISIS. The panel was hosted by the New York City Bar Association and chaired by Prof.Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall. It included Prof. Ryan Goodman of NYU and Prof....
Africa Nigeria's military is confident it has Boko Haram cornered, but a final push to clear the Islamist militants from their forest hideouts is being hampered by landmines, it said on Saturday. Congo-Brazzaville has banned Muslim women from wearing the full face-veil in public, citing security reasons, an Islamic association said. Middle East and Northern Africa Nearly 5,800 migrants have been rescued from boats...
Africa Sudan has accused a peacekeeping force in Darfur of killing seven civilians in three separate incidents last week, threatening to exacerbate the government's strained relations with the international mission. Nearly 15,000 Burundians have fled into Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo since mid-March, United Nations and Rwandan officials said on Friday, amid growing fears of violence in the run-up to...
The last two weeks of posts at Opinio Juris have seen several items from Julian, including on his favorite treaty reservation ever in the Hague Child Support Treaty and more on the HCST and the role of US states here. He also asked the burning question of whether the new “Bipartisan Trade Priorities and Accountability Act” violate the U.S. Constitution’s bicameralism and presentment...
A new report entitled “Nuclear Weapons: the State of Play 2015” makes for very sober reading. The authors are Gareth Evans, Tanya Ogilvie-White and Ramesh Thakur, and the report was written for the upcoming NPT review conference. Gareth Evans is on a world-tour releasing the report, and yesterday I saw him at the International Peace Institute in New York. You can...
The NYTimes has a piece today on how Idaho's refusal to implement the Hague Child Support Treaty is causing problems for the U.S. and for Idaho as a whole. I hope to have more to say about this treaty later. For now, in looking at the treaty, I wanted to point readers to one of the more amusing U.S. treaty...
Africa Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir will travel to Indonesia on Monday for a summit, Sudan's foreign ministry said, in his first trip outside of Africa or the Middle East in nearly four years. **UPDATE** Al-Bashir cancelled his trip to Indonesia, sources say, based on not receiving permission from several states to fly over their airspace en route to Jakarta. Two Kenyans...
I am slammed with a couple of projects right now, but I can't help throwing this question out to the legal blogosphere. Does the new "Bipartisan Trade Priorities and Accountability Act" recently introduced by leading U.S. Senators violate the U.S. Constitution's bicameralism and presentment requirements as stated by the U.S. Supreme Court in INS v. Chadha? The BTPAA seems crucial as...
Among my many hobby-horses is a fascination with the role of the individual American states in the interpretation and implementation of international law within the U.S. In past work, for instance, I have argued that states can individually implement treaties via guidance from Uniform Laws. I had a few examples of this phenomenon in my article, and I think it will...
[William S. Dodge is The Honorable Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. From August 2011 to July 2012, he served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on the amicus briefs filed by the United States in Kiobel v....
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Kenya has given the United Nations three months to remove a camp housing more than half a million Somali refugees, as part of a get-tough response to the killing of 148 people by Somali gunmen at a Kenyan university. Middle East and Northern Africa An Egyptian court's decision to...
This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a Book Symposium on Interpretation in International Law. The Symposium was introduced by Daniel Peat and Matthew Windsor who offered the framework and context of the book in describing their introductory chapter (available here), explaining that the idea of interpretation in their work centers around the metaphor of a game, with each of the authors...
