In association with the International Commission of Jurists

So Far, the “Apology” Hasn’t Helped

25 Jun

I obviously disagreed with the ICC's decision to issue the non-apology apology, but I sincerely hoped that it would at least lead to Taylor's release.  Unfortunately, Libya has given no indication that, having suitably humiliated both the Court and Bob Carr, it has any intention of releasing her: Carr said Friday’s talks in the Hague between the ICC and Libyan authorities...

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24 Jun

I have often chided David Bernstein for his misrepresentation of the work done by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, so it is only fair to call out progressives when they, too, distort that work.  Political Animal, which is associated with the Washington Monthly, is one of my favorite progressive blogs.  But a recent post by Kathleen Geier that claims...

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24 Jun

Conferences The Institute for Transnational Arbitration has announced its Second Annual Winter Forum, being held in Miami Florida and will take place January 24-25, 2013. Calls for Papers The Australian Journal of International Law has issued a call for papers on international law with a submission deadline of June 30, 2012. In honor of the service of the registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for...

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23 Jun

As Mark Kersten has already ably discussed at Justice in Conflict, the ICC released a statement yesterday regarding Melinda Taylor's detention.  Ironically, although I think everything about the statement is profoundly devastating to the Court's credibility, I am actually slightly less bothered than Mark by the "regret" section of the statement: The ICC deeply regrets any events that may have given...

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22 Jun

I love soccer (excuse me, "football."). And I actually really enjoy tournaments like the Euro Championships or the World Cup because they remind me of the very powerful patriotic emotions that still exist, even in this supposedly post-national age, and even in the post-national E.U.  Who needs a European Constitution? I will truly believe in the Euro-State when the Europeans...

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22 Jun

Since the late 1990s, thirty-nine nations have signed the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. So far so good. But unfortunately, the treaty essentially is toothless, requiring nations to implement national laws that prohibit foreign bribery, but doing little more. Only a handful of countries are effectively enforcing their anti-bribery laws. Which ones? Well, the answer seems to...

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21 Jun

[This guest post is from Jonathan Hafetz, Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law. He has also represented several Guantanamo detainees.] The Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari last week in seven Guantanamo detainee cases marks the end of an important chapter in the post-9/11 habeas corpus litigation.  It leaves in place the D.C. Circuit’s narrow construction of the constitutional...

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21 Jun

[John E. Noyes is the Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at California Western School of Law.] My thanks again to Julian Ku for organizing this series on U.S. accession to the Law of the Sea Convention.  I write to respond to Mr. Groves’s contention, based on U.S. experience in the Gulf of Mexico, that U.S. accession is not needed to further...

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21 Jun

At Justice in Conflict, Mark Kersten is keeping track of developments concerning Taylor's detention.  Checking out some of his links, I was struck (not for the first time, of course) by how little the media knows about how the ICC works -- and by their willingness to think the worst of criminal defense attorneys, even in the absence of any...

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21 Jun

[Paul Schiff Berman is Dean and Robert Kramer Research Professor at George Washington University Law School.] I want to thank all the participants in this online symposium both for their extraordinarily thoughtful comments on my book and for their many constructive interventions through the years as I have been developing these ideas.  I am blessed to be part of a truly supportive academic community, and these posts exemplify all that can be good about thoughtful academic discourse built on dialogue rather than one-upsmanship.  Such fruitful academic discourse should not be so rare, but that only means we must be especially grateful when true community is instantiated before our eyes. As to the individual comments, I won’t respond to all of them.  Certainly, there are many aspects of our plural world that I wish were better reflected in the book.  As Janet Levit points out, I do not have nearly enough examples from the world of non-state law-making (mostly because they are more difficult to find and document).  Likewise, Jeff Dunoff is surely right that regime interaction is an area that deserves greater attention than I paid to it (and his work usefully provides such attention).  The same is true of the international financial regulation described by David Zaring.  Finally, Peter Spiro correctly identifies the difficulties inherent in deciding when a community is well-enough defined to justify recognition.  All of these are matters that further work will need to flesh out. So, here let me confine my remarks to three quick responses and one small quibble. 
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20 Jun

[Hari M. Osofsky is Associate Professor and 2011 Lampert Fesler Research Fellow, University of Minnesota Law School and Associate Director of Law, Geography & Environment, Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences] This post is part of our symposium on Dean Schiff Berman's book Global Legal Pluralism. Other posts can be found in Related Posts below. It is an honor and a pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in this conversation about Paul Berman's exciting new book, "Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders.”  Like many of the commentators, I have had the privilege of watching this project evolve over several years.  The book is a tremendous contribution which reflects Paul's command of numerous interdisciplinary literatures and substantive areas of law.  It makes an articulate and compelling case for taking a cosmopolitan and pluralist approach to law in an era of globalization. My two primary interventions in this brief blog are not so much critiques of the book, as suggestions for directions Paul and others could go from here to explore these issues in additional ways.  First, as Paul and I have discussed for many years, I think his geographical analysis might be developed further by focusing on issues of scale more deeply.  Early on, I queried whether the book should be called "multiscalar legal pluralism" rather than "global legal pluralism."  I wondered whether Paul could fully capture the interactions and institutional hybridity through focusing on the "global" or "international" levels. Paul has done much to address that concern in the ways in which he has incorporated multiple levels of government, even using the term "multiscalar" in the context of discussing climate change federalism.  However, I would be excited to see him go even deeper in future explorations of scale in this context.  Specifically, I wonder what "global" or "international" means in a cosmopolitan and pluralist world.  To the extent that one accepts geographer Kevin Cox's theory that each level is constituted by core interactions at that level and by interactions across levels (a theory that I often draw from in my own work), multiple visions of the international scale might result.  These possibilities for pluralism in defining global scale might impact the hybrid forms that Paul explores so thoughtfully.
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