Professor Elena Baylis hosted a really terrific workshop on socio-legal approaches to international law at the University of Pittsburgh last week. Elena has a blog post up at Intlawgrrls that explains how the workshop came to be. As one of the law professors in a group that was split evenly between anthropologists and legal scholars, I learned a lot about...
On March 6, 2008, a Palestinian resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jebel Mukabber entered an Israeli religious seminary in West Jerusalem and opened fire on students with an automatic weapon, killing 7 (all but one under the age of 17) and injuring many more. On July 2, 2008, a Palestinian resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur...
Opinio Juris is pleased to welcome Daniel Seidemann as a guest blogger this week to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the future of Jerusalem. Daniel is the founder and legal advisor for Ir Amim, a non-profit, non-partisan association dedicated to an equitable, stable and sustainable Jerusalem. Ir Amim (“City of Nations” or “City of Peoples”) was founded in...
Tom, Thanks for that cordial response. I did not mean to give offense, but wanted to be direct about my perception. I'm also under pressure for something else, so I won't go on for too long. On the Israel-Palestinian conflict and its role in defining neoconservatism and, more broadly, the book's thesis overall. I take your writing very seriously indeed, always...
Among several fascinating themes in Farer and Kris Boon dialogue has been the detention and trial of accused terrorists. Governments that feel besieged frequently depart from peace-time standards. Their lawyers and diplomats try to justify the departures. And some arguments are better than others. But rarely does the public have the opportunity to weigh in on whether to depart from...
Tom Farer's 'Latin Americanization' thesis deserves comment; i.e. that recent anti-terrorism / Guantanamo measures by the Bush administration are comparable to tactics that certain authoritarian Latin American regimes undertook, in that (i) states of emergency were proclaimed in conjunction with incursions on human rights, and that (ii) neither judicial nor congressional oversight effectively limited the executive's power. The analogy between the current US administration's behavior towards terrorism...
In his opening post and in the opening chapter of his book, Tom Farer gives us a tour of the horizon of how international law and self-interest interact in American foreign policy thinking. He paints a picture which focuses on a struggle between two different views of America's role in the world, the Liberal view and the Neocon view. In this...
Let me begin the discussion by addressing one of the most important issues addressed in Farer's book: combating terrorism consistent with the Charter. Farer presents the issue of the permissible options for the United States if it discovers that terrorist organizations or individuals are active in country X and planning an attack on American targets. If the...
I had resolved to say nothing about Sarah Palin -- really I had. But since I was sent home from school in Junior High for eliminating the "under God" part of the Pledge of Allegiance when it was my turn to read it over the school intercom, I just couldn't let this go. Palin was asked in 2006, during her...
Turns out (along with who knows what else) that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, active enough to have attended its statewide convention in 1994. The party argues that Alaska's accession by referendum in 1958 violated international law, insofar as voters were not given the choice of independence in addition to the ballot options of statehood or continued status...
Some hard-working soul on the Democratic vice presidential vetting team had to make her way through a law review article Joe Biden co-authored in the late 1980's on constitutional war powers. The piece is pretty safe stuff, advocating a "joint decision model" for use-of-force decisionmaking. In the course of proposing some tinkering with the War Powers Resolution, there is this...
Franck Fife/AFP via MSNBC As we've learned from our expert guest-bloggers, there are disputes arising out of the Olympics, and then there are DISPUTES. The reported International Olympic Committee investigation into the age of Chinese gymnast and gold medalist He Kexin （何可欣） qualifies as the type of DISPUTE that could really get ugly. Why? Because a big part of the investigation...
