A big case from the U.S. District Court here in New York came down this week, and I was spending my time reading blog posts on Harold Koh. Where are my priorities? In an important test of the scope of the Alien Tort Statute's application to multinational corporations, Judge Shira Scheindlin has finally ruled on the defendant corporations' motion to...
I have tried to stay quiet in the ongoing “Koh Wars” in the blogosphere, where Ed Whelan seems to be taking on the entire legal academic blogosphere himself and getting in a bad mood about it. I am also conflicted. I am a former student of Professor Koh and I have always admired his energy, passion, and his willingness to...
[ Laura Dickinson is Foundation Professor of Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.] Recent attempts to criticize Harold Hongju Koh’s appointment to be the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State have gone from silly to absurd. Koh, currently the Dean and the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor at Yale Law School, is one...
If you read one article about the recently released February 2007 ICRC report on U.S. use of torture, read this one by Mark Danner in the current issue of the NY Review of Books. Danner correctly points out that, at least since 2004, the broad contours of the practice of torture by the U.S. government have been publicly known. But...
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a "word cloud" Image from Wordle....
Read all about today’s blockbuster decision in which a U.S. federal district court held, in light of Boumediene, that detainees held at the U.S. Air Force Base in Bagram, Afghanistan, have a constitutional right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus in U.S. courts. A longer description and link to the 53-page opinion are here. Key caveat:...
Back in February, I noted that the ASIL Task Force on U.S. Policy Toward the International Criminal Court had adopted a set of recommendations for how the Obama Administration could take steps to engage with the ICC in new, more positive ways than the preceding Bush Administration. As part of the ASIL Conference last week, the Task Force released a...
On Monday, the Eleventh Circuit rendered an interesting opinion in the case of King v. Cessna Aircraft on the subject of forum non conveniens and the rights foreign plaintiffs under bilateral treaties. The case arose out of wrongful death actions by American and European plaintiffs against Cessna Aircraft arising from a plane crash in Italy. The district court...
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="420" caption="Bonn Negotiations Get Underway"][/caption] The climate change “negotiations” resumed this week in Bonn. I put “negotiations” in quotes (or as they say here in England, “inverted commas”) because there has been little negotiating over the past 18 months since the Bali Action Plan was adopted. (The UNFCCC web site characterizes the sessions this week as “talks”.) Indeed,...
As usual, I’m likely last online to note the now-official news of Harold Koh’s nomination to be Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State. For what it’s worth, we’d seen it coming. If the Senate has any sense, the nomination will sail through. I can’t imagine a candidate more qualified. Congratulations Dean Koh! And now back...
I have received a number of emails from regulars complaining that their comments are being moderated. They are, but not on the basis of their content. Our comment system automatically flags any comment that contains a hyperlink, because spam comments always contain them. We then have to manually approve the non-spam comments, which we try to do as soon as...
Opinio Juris is pleased to welcome back Professor Dan Bodansky as a guest blogger with us over the next two weeks. Dan is currently a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, and his home institution is the University of Georgia Law School where he is the Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Woodruff Professor of...
