I want to call readers' attention to a very useful new essay written by Emory's Laurie Blank, which is forthcoming in the William Mitchell Law Review. Here is the abstract: Targeted strikes – predominantly using drones – have become the operational counterterrorism tool of choice for the United States over the past few years. Targeted killing can...
(Professor Kenneth A. Armstrong is professor of European Law at Queen Mary University, London; this comment was posted in response to KA's framing questions on European governance, and we are delighted to bring it up to the main page. We welcome short or long comments on this topic; I'll choose to bring some to general attention in a separate post;...
Last fall, I posted about possible governance effects of eurozone crisis on the EZ and, more broadly, the EU. I raised questions not as an expert on European institutions, law, or governance, but as someone with a long interest in governance and legitimacy questions for the international system. They elicited some very interesting responses, particularly from University of Connecticut’s Peter...
A certified English translation of the Lago Agrio Ecuador Appeals Court judgment, together with the original Spanish, was filed with the Second Circuit today and is available here. ...
I think there is little doubt where I stand on the merits of the Chevron litigation, so I am not going to get into the substance of the dispute here. But I have an honest question that I am hoping someone will answer. Let's assume, for sake of argument, that Chevron is correct to argue that the $18 billion judgment...
As Kevin noted yesterday, on January 3, 2012 an Ecuador Appeals Court affirmed the $18 billion judgment against Chevron in the long-running battle over environmental damage. (Available in English and the original Spanish here). According to an unofficial English translation of the sixteen page opinion, the Court dismissed all of Chevron’s arguments, including the allegations of fraud....
Great news -- an appeals court in Ecuador has upheld the $18 billion damages award imposed on Chevron for the damage caused by its deliberate dumping of more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste-water in the country, known as the "Rainforest Chernobyl": The lawsuit deals with pollution of the rainforest by energy company Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001. Chevron...
This post will seem like an extended plug for my own work, so apologies. But I wanted to offer a few thoughts on the legal issues raised by Ruti's excellent post, the politics of which -- with one exception, noted below -- I completely share. First, Ruti asks whether Libya should be able to claim the right to try to Saif...
My thanks to Marty and Steve for their fascinating and insightful posts (here and here) on the NDAA. I have many thoughts about the Act, but I want to focus here on the idea that U.S. courts can and should analogize to detention in international armed conflict in order to determine what it means for a person to have “substantially...
By Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck* Section 1021 of the NDAA and the Laws of War In our companion post, we explained that section 1021 of the NDAA will not have the dramatic effects that many critics have predicted--in particular, that it will not affect the unresolved question of whether the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) would authorize a...
By Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck* Editorial pages and blogs have been overrun in the past couple of weeks with analyses and speculation about the detainee provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, which the President has just signed into law. One of the major disputes concerns whether and how the NDAA might alter the status quo. In this post, we'll...
In case the government's actions haven't yet convinced you of the fundamental unfairness of the commissions (such as making up war crimes), perhaps its decision to treat the attorney-client privilege as optional will do the trick: The new commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison wants a team of government and law enforcement officials to be allowed to review all ...
