In an 8 page decision handed down on January 9, Judge Paul Oetken found that the UN is immune in Delama Georges et. al v. UN, the so-called “Haiti Cholera case.” The decision is available at: http://www.ijdh.org/2015/01/projects/united-states-district-court-southern-district-of-new-york/ The finding that the UN is immune rests on two points: first, that the UN did not expressly waive its immunity under the...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa At least 80 people have been abducted and three others killed in a cross-border raid in northern Cameroon by the Nigerian armed group Boko Haram, officials have said. Nigeria's neighbors are banding together to fight the armed group; a contingent of soldiers from Chad has arrived in northern...
Picking up on Kevin's post about Fox News' reporting on the terrorist threat (or something) in Europe, it's worth noting that in addition to reporting that multiple areas of Paris were now "no go" zones, Fox also reported "poll results" purporting to show that 69% of Muslims in France support ISIS; and an 'expert's' assertion that Birmingham, England is a...
This week, we celebrated Opinio Juris' 10th anniversary, with our permabloggers weighing in with their thoughts on the last decade of blogging. Julian kicked the discussion off with how the legal blogosphere has changed over the last ten years. Roger reflected on blogging and the marketplace of ideas. In Peter's musings, he explored the evolution of international law as well as the role blogging...
Although I've only been a regular OJ blogger for two years now, I feel like I've known OJ since it was born. Chris Borgen, Julian Ku and I have been friends since we all worked together at Debevoise and Plimpton in New York years ago. Over the years I've gotten to know Peggy, Roger, Ken, Deborah, Duncan, and at least by...
For 10 years, Opinio Juris has served as a forum for short-form legal scholarship. Many posts were short and simple, quickly flagging a particular development or issue and bringing it to the attention of international lawyers across the globe. But other posts were far more in depth, analyzing a complex legal issue with great subtlety and persuasion. What strikes me...
I published my first post on Opinio Juris on February 10, 2006. That was almost nine years ago, and although I do not have exact figures, I estimate that I've written around 1,800 posts and close to a million words on the blog since. And my lifetime numbers are actually even a bit higher -- beginning in August 2004, I blogged for a while...
When Peter Spiro wrote to ask me back in 2007 whether I might be interested in writing a response to then-State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger’s posts on the blog, Opinio Juris, I had two nearly simultaneous reactions: (1) The U.S. State Department Legal Adviser was writing on a blog?!; and (2) Yes. I am, as I take it...
In a comment to a recent post, Patrick O’Donnell noted a post from the first year of Opinio Juris in which I had taken a crack at starting a list of the “must reads “of international law. I wanted to get a discussion going over what should be the key scholarly texts in our field. Opinio Juris readers made significant...
When Chris, Julian and I started our modest “conversation” about international law ten year ago, we were not universally praised. Nor were we instantly accepted. Who did we think we were, we pre-tenure punks just starting out in this field? And what were people to make of this short-form, internet-based content? As Chris noted, we really didn’t know what we...
One of my first posts with Opinio Juris remains one of my all time favorites -- Strawberries versus Skin Cancer. Looking back, that post marked a transition point for me as a scholar and an academic; in it, I began to allow myself to think more critically about my former employer, the U.S. State Department, even as I remained loyal to...
You know you’ve reached a certain age when you start saying, “I remember when. . .” Well, I remember when international law was considered a legal chimera and an academic backwater. Policymakers would take it into account in only a limited set of circumstances, and then usually only where it was consistent with other agendas. In law schools it was ghettoized:...
