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...
[John Louth is Editor-in-Chief of Academic Law at Oxford University Press.] I make it 401, but more of that below. A few years ago when we carried out some research into law scholars’ habits we found many were telling us that there was so much being published that they didn’t even try to keep up anymore. I decided to try and see...
I want to start off our conversation about the larger project Bianchi, Peat and Windsor have undertaken with their new book before introducing my own contribution to it. For years, the concept of interpretation has had a fairly narrow focus within the international legal landscape. It has almost uniformly been associated with a discrete set of objects -- treaties. From Grotius...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Gunmen from the Islamist militant group al Shabaab stormed a university in Kenya and killed at least 147 people on Thursday, in the worst attack on Kenyan soil since the U.S. embassy was bombed in 1998. Al Jazeera offers a context piece about why al Shabaab has...
This week on Opinio Juris, Kevin posted links to Justice in Conflict's symposium on Palestine and the ICC (1, 2), and commented on John Bellinger's op-ed on the prosecution of ISIS through the ICC. Following the University of Southampton's withdrawal of its permission for a conference on Israel, Kevin argued that Israel's defenders use double standards when it comes to academic freedom. He also...
I have to teach in 5 minutes so I just wanted to post a quick link and one comment on the Iran deal reached earlier today. Those who want to read the joint statement itself -- you can read it here. My first reaction, based on my primer of a few weeks ago, is that it sure looks like the deal is taking...
Does anyone out there in OJ-land know of a good book about the re-establishment of diplomatic relations? Ideally it would focus on the US (such as with Vietnam in 1995), but one discussing any country will do. I'm particularly interested in a book that describes the nuts and bolts of re-engagement: how the decision was made, how they selected the location of...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Kenya's government said it was "shocked and concerned" over the latest travel warnings issued by the UK and others and said security conditions in the east African country were improving. Islamist Boko Haram insurgents launched two deadly attacks on voters in northeast Nigeria on Saturday, police and a...
In the last fortnight at Opinio Juris, we saw Julian critique M. Cherif Bassiouni on his take on the Amanda Knox case in Italy, arguing that she would indeed be extraditable to the US. Peter analyzed whether the Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is in fact a natural-born citizen (spoiler alert: he is). Kevin posted his thoughts on the two-year anniversary of the...
I have been feeling a little guilty for blogging about the Amanda Knox case since it is more of a People Magazine topic than an Opinio Juris one. But just today, I realized that even someone as respected in the international law field as M. Cherif Bassiouni has opined on her extraditability in this OUP blog post from last April....
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Two Chadian army helicopters bombed Nigerian Boko Haram positions on Sunday, killing several dozen militants near a village on the border with Niger, a senior Niger military official told Reuters. A South Sudanese rebel group has freed 250 child soldiers it was using, including a girl as young as...
