Kal deserves a hearty congratulations on the publication of Does the Constitution Follow the Flag. The book is really a tour de force. Kal offers a sweeping treatment of over two centuries of legal thought respecting territoriality in its multiple manifestations; situates his discussion in wider political, economic, and intellectual developments during this same period; brings out the...
I want to join others in congratulating Kal on the publication of his outstanding book. I also want to thank the OJ contributors for inviting me to visit their territory. Issues of spatiality -- place, geography, and territory -- have been largely under-examined in legal scholarship. This book is an invaluable synthesis and examination of a critical aspect of legal spatiality. One of the...
Thanks to Kal for joining us to discuss his terrific new book. I’m on board with the premise that international politics goes a long way to explaining the arc of U.S. foreign relations law, including rules relating to territoriality; and Kal is absolutely correct that US law scholars pay too little heed to the global context as an explanation for doctrinal...
“Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?” is a fascinating book, and one of its great strengths is that it juxtaposes a number of different examples of how law and territory do not align, some of which have been largely forgotten. When most of us think about extraterritoriality, we think of issues like the extraterritorial application of antitrust law, the applicability...
A century ago the presidential race between Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan was consumed by the question of whether "the Constitution follows the flag." The United States had just acquired several overseas colonies in the wake of the Spanish-American War. The Democratic Party platform of 1900 declared that “We hold that the Constitution follows the flag, and...
Opinio Juris is pleased to be hosting over the next three days a discussion of Professor Kal Raustiala's new book, "Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law" (OUP 2009). Professor Raustiala is a professor of law at UCLA and also director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. He...
Story here. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities entered into force in May 2008. It has some 60+ parties even though it's only been open for signature for a little over two years. Signing, of course, is the easy part. Question is what kind of push the Obama Administration will put into ratification and with what sort...
Recently, advocates for asylum seekers fleeing severe and state-sanctioned domestic violence in their home countries appeared to score a significant victory. In the case of a woman who requested asylum based on fears she would be murdered by her common-law husband in Mexico, the Department of Homeland Security filed a brief in April (unsealed recently as reported by the...
The Rwandan government announced today that it will stop taking new gacaca cases as of July 31st and that it intends to wind down gacaca operations within five months. Gacaca is a traditional local justice procedure (gacaca roughly means “justice on the grass” in Kinyarwanda) that the government modified to process the staggering number of low-level genocide cases and...
My former student, Jeff Cook, who is currently serving as a postgraduate legal fellow with International Justice Mission in Phnom Penh, has a humorous post about litigation in Cambodia. Here is what Cook says is the common practice for witnesses swearing to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth": It didn't take long for me to...
For critics of universal jurisdiction, Spain's UJ statute has become the poster child for accusations of excess. How strange it seems that roughly ten years ago it was so widely celebrated as the provision that brought down General Augusto Pinochet. Spain's indicting the former Chilean dictator and Britain's detaining him on the attendant arrest warrant and extradition request...
John Bellinger, who served as the Bush administration Legal Advisor to the State Department (in which capacity he famously guest blogged at Opinio Juris!), has an op-ed in today's last Saturday's NY Times calling for legislation to override the Supreme Court's decision in Medellin v. Texas and to give effect to the ICJ's 2003 decision in Avena. The legislation...
