http://opiniojuris.org Just another WordPress weblog Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:50:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/25/joe-biden-world-government-guy/ I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my experiences in Georgia in the early 1990s, monitoring the various conflicts - Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the then-Georgian civil war in Tbilisi.  I noted that those secessionist conflicts were marked on each side by ethnic cleansing as extreme as anything I ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/24/georgia-south-ossetia-and-abkhazia/ This year, I am watching the Olympic Games on television in the United States for the first time since the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. It has been my singular honor to have been selected to be an arbitrator on the ad hoc Division of the Court of Arbitration for ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/23/the-cleanest-games-ever/ (First, before anything else, a welcome to Eric Posner back to the blogosphere, lately of Slate's Convictions (in the same shutdown that gave OJ the welcome opportunity to snag Deborah Pearlstein) and now of Volokh Conspiracy, where Eric has been posting particularly related to the resurgence of Russia.) I have been ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/23/ambiguity-in-international-law-and-diplomacy-and-the-ambiguous-meaning-of-multilateralism-at-the-un/ Take a look at this commentary about Russia invading Georgia: In order to be able to deny the invasion of Russian troops, it was first stated that some villages on the Georgian frontier had revolted, embittered by the tyranny of the, Georgians.... Simultaneously, Abkhazia had risen in the extreme northwest, close ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/22/interesting-quote-on-russian-invasion-of-georgia/      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 ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/21/how-could-you-take-away-her-medal-ioc-investigating-chinese-gymnasts-age/ I know politics makes strange bedfellows, but this is ridiculous: Two unlikely allies met for breakfast last month in New York to discuss a possible collaboration: Mia Farrow, actress and passionate activist for Darfur refugees, and Erik Prince, founder and CEO of the government contractor, Blackwater Worldwide. Farrow told ABC News that ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/21/can-mia-farrow-and-blackwater-save-darfur/ I would be remiss if I did not mark, here at Opinio Juris, the fifth anniversary of the tragic death of UN diplomat and humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in the terrorist attack on the UN's Baghdad headquarters in 2003 along with many other aid and relief workers. ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/21/sergio-vieira-de-mello-et-al-in-memoriam-five-years-on/ 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 ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/20/the-laptop-and-internet-debate-in-law-classrooms/ I have this gnawing suspicion that the only two law professors deeply interested in battlefield robotics are Glenn Reynolds and me.  Nonetheless, when it comes to battlefield bots and the law, you can take satisfaction that you will have Heard It Here First, unless, of course, you read Instapundit.   As I've ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/20/battlefield-robot-target-identification-competition/ The Olympics have been amazing. Great athletes, amazing venues, wonderful organization. The Chinese have much to be proud of. But whatever goodwill that the Olympics have engendered in me is quickly being lost based on their treatment of dissent. The Chinese are being utterly hypocritical in ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/20/losing-goodwill-at-the-games/ 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 ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/20/can-you-guess-the-accent/ For anyone following the situation in Georgia and US/ Russian relations, there was a very interesting statement and Q&A today from Secretary of State Rice, who is in Brussels for meetings at NATO. Among other things, she announced the creation of a new NATO-Georgia cooperative framework and also discussed the concerns about ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/19/secstate-rice-announces-new-nato-georgia-commission-and-discusses-us-russia-relations/ I've missed Eric Muller's blogging at Is That Legal? -- but he has obviously put his free time to good use, because his new article on the Supreme Court's decision in Hirabayashi v. United States is sensational.  Here is the abstract: This Article presents newly discovered archival evidence demonstrating that government ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/18/eric-muller-on-the-lie-behind-hirabayashi/ The most famous quote from the founder of the modern Olympic Games is: “The important thing is not to win, but to take part” (L'important n'est pas de gagner, mais de participer). So far, the Beijing experience of the CAS Ad Hoc Division seems to give a new relevance to ... http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/18/limportant-c%e2%80%99est-participer%e2%80%a6/