Criticism of the humanitarian response to the tsunami in South Asia has shifted from early accusations of inadequate relief flows to concerns that donor nations, rebel groups, and affected governments are playing politics with relief efforts. Reports that the US is (and arguments that it should be) using its relief effort to prosecute the war on terror can be found...
In the department of self-promotion, I thought I would note that John Yoo and I have posted our forthcoming article from the Supreme Court Review entitled, "Beyond Formalism in Foreign Affairs: A Functional Approach to the Alien Tort Statute". In this article, John and I consider the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision interpreting the ATS to permit federal courts to...
We plan to publicize important academic colloquia on international law as we learn about them. To get us started, I am including a link to the Northwestern Law School's International Law Colloquium for Spring 2005. Thanks to Ken Abbot and John McGinnis for the information. A permanent list of upcoming symposia and events will be added to the right side...
Mirror of Justice has an interesting post on an essay in the Human Rights Watch's 2005 World Report on the "growing conflicts between religious communities and the human rights movement." The HRW essay on religion and human rights can be found here. Following is an excerpt (footnotes omitted) from the Preface of the Human Rights Watch essay entitled "Religion and the...
Another blog you might want to check out is The TransAtlantic Assembly, a blog hosted by U.S. and European lawyers and academics on issues of international law, transnational law, and EU law. Recent posts have considered EU enlargement, the torture memos in the U.S., and a dispute over public and private morality and EU regulation. Highly recommended. ...
I rashly promised to blog more about the WTO's recent report by a panel of "wise men" recommending reforms for the trade organization before I realized just how long blogging that whole report would take. Let me instead point you to this typically incisive summary ($) by The Economist and this op-ed by one of the "wise men", superstar economist...
Harvard law prof and former Bush Administration chief of the Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith has a clever op-ed in the Washington Post today recommending that the U.S. support a Security Council referral of the Darfur atrocities to the ICC. Why clever? Because, as Goldsmith explains, the U.S. can support a referral to the ICC here because it...
For public international law types, East Asia is a relatively barren place. There are no regional international tribunals and barely any regional international organizations of any importance. It is interesting to compare East Asia to, say, the Andean Community in Latin America, or the African Union. There is simply no suggestion or hint of any aspirations toward...
For those interested in following the law and politics of the European Union, two blogs of note: Duke Law School Professor Francesca Bignami’s EU Law Web Log is a great place to keep up on Commission decisions, European Court of Justice judgments and other EU happenings. Also, as LawPundit pointed out, Swedish EU Commissioner Margot Wallstrom has started her own...
Following up on our posts here, here, and here on the Breyer-Scalia discussion on foreign law and constitutional interpretation, Seth Tillman, a clerk on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals who has published widely on a variety of topics (see here), points out that Breyer may even have offered a foreign policy justification for citing foreign law. He writes, I...
From the “The More Things Change….” Dept: CNN has picked up a story from AP about the recently declassified documents of a Nixon and Ford-era Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism. The Committee, which included Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers, and included the input of Rudolf Giuliani, who was at the time an Associate Deputy Attorney General in...
Although this judgment was released a few days ago, it is still worth noting that a federal district court in New York this week issued a ruling in a mammoth civil suit by family members of September 11 victims against various entities for the attacks. The most important defendant to be dismissed on the grounds of sovereign immunity are various...
