There is nothing international law specific about this pedagogically-oriented post. But as the new fall semester begins for many readers of this blog, I am curious about where OJ readers stand on the question of limiting or prohibiting laptop use or internet access in classrooms. I have written on my regular blog about this topic, as have many other professors....
The Language Trainers Group has a great new on-line game: trying to guess what country 16 people with different accents are from. It's called, not surprisingly, Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From? I scored a 28 -- a full 10 points higher than Blake Hounsell, who tipped me off to the game at FP Blog. And yes, I could...
With the announcement of a six-point plan for a Georgian cease-fire, attention is shifting to how to construct a durable and equitable peace in the Caucasus. As the parties settle-in for some sort of negotiation, I find it interesting how the ideas about international law and norms are used in the statements of the parties. Here are a couple of examples from a CNN...
Almost a decade ago, Tom Friedman famously scoffed at the idea of a "Microsoft Navy" defending the shipping lanes of the Pacific. But technology has a way of moving us in unforeseen directions, raising the possibility not just of aggressive cyberwarfare, but of cyber-defense forces. So, when hackers (allegedly Russian in origin) took down Civil.ge, the official English-language official Georgian news cite, Georgia turned to Google Blogspot...
We don’t insist that our major-league ball players come from the cities that they play for. Why should we demand any more from Olympic athletes? The Beijing Games includes more athletes with tenuous ties to the country whose flag they followed into Friday’s opening ceremonies. There are some who have jumped states in search of better-funded Olympic programs. Others couldn't...
As Marty points out in his post, whether convicting Hamdan of "material support for terrorism" (MST) violates the Ex Post Facto Clause will be a major issue in Hamdan's appeal. Having now read Judge Allred's decision carefully, I strongly disagree with his conclusion that it does not. Judge Allred's framing of the ex post facto issue (p. 3) is unobjectionable: "the...
Okay, so Medellin himself is going down. But as Julian highlights above, Texas has now undertaken to extend some sort of review and reconsideration to others covered by the Avena judgment. Why the quiet retreat? Here's some totally unsupported speculation: this is the result of a deal between Texas and Mexico. The GOM is sophisticated enough to understand...
Almost buried amid the last-minute flurry of litigation over Medellin's pending execution tonight at 7 p.m. EDT, Texas has made a potentially important but ambiguous concession to the ICJ. It has agreed to support federal habeas petitions in the future for Mexican citizens arguing that a failure of consular notification had caused prejudice to their criminal conviction and death sentence....
Greg Fox of Wayne State University Law School has posted a new article on SSRN that examines the proposed US/Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) from a unique angle. Discussions in U.S. academic journals and blogs have tended to focus on the constitutionality under U.S. law of the Administration pursuing the completion of a long-term security arrangement with Iraq under...
Executive invocations of foreign affairs as the basis for dismissing otherwise valid litigation doesn't seem to work very well these days. But there is one area where (thus far) courts have continued to give the U.S. executive essentially complete deference: determinations on immunity for heads of state. And so it is today in the Federal District Court of D.C.'s decision...
Well, we never got as far as interrogation or surveillance, but that's okay. This has been a truly exceptional exchange, a model of everything the debate over law and the war on terror too often is not: civil, serious, rigorous, and respectful of the profound difficulty of the issues at hand. Many thanks to all who participated in it and to...
I want to close by thanking Ben for writing this terrific book, and our hosts here at OJ for sponsoring this discussion. Before sigining off, however, I want to offer a few predictions and related observations about the road ahead. It appears quite possible that in the near future we will substantially reduce our reliance on military detention for terrorism suspects at...
