Don't worry, I will not be linking to any and all reviews of my book. (Only the good ones.) I mention this review -- a review essay written by the distinguished scholar David Fraser at Nottingham (sub. req.) -- because it uses my book as a springboard to discuss a number of important historiographic issues concerning World War II scholarship...
A group of distinguished Nuremberg scholars, including myself (minus the distinguished part), have filed an amicus brief in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum on behalf of the petitioners. The brief argues that although the Nuremberg trials themselves did not involve the prosecution of juridical persons such as corporations, a wide variety of Allied actions outside of judicial fora indicate that...
What is fascinating about this lawsuit is the focus on getting the "legal advice" as opposed to simply information about the targeted killings policy. The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice charging that the government failed to release information under the Freedom of Information Act on records surrounding questions of the legality of targeted killing,...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x_tmig8PxAw...
My friends at Leiden -- my alma mater -- have asked me to post the following call for papers: Call for Papers for the Jus Post Bellum Project Launch Conference The Jus Post Bellum Project at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University has issued a call for papers for the Project's launch conference. The conference, entitled "'Jus-Post-Bellum': Mapping the...
The Court of Appeal judgment orders the UK government to seek the release of Yunus Rahmatullah, an alleged member of Lashkar-e-Taiba who has been detained at Bagram since 2004, from U.S. custody. What is particularly interesting about the decision is that it directly -- though implicitly -- rejects a little-known memo written by Jack Goldsmith while he was at the...
Ashley Deeks, a fellow at Columbia and a former member of the Office of the Legal Adviser, has posted an essay on SSRN -- forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of International Law -- entitled "Unwilling or Unable: Toward an Normative Framework for Extra-Territorial Self-Defense." Here is the abstract: Non-state actors, including terrorist groups, regularly launch attacks against states, often...
That's the question that a Ninth Circuit en banc panel heard yesterday in Movesian v. Versicherung AG. There is no statute, treaty or executive order refusing to recognize the Armenian Genocide, but there have been equivocal statements by various Presidents on the subject and failed attempts to adopt congressional resolutions recognizing the Armenian genocide. Is that enough to...
Ah, the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act...
Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkol Karman delivered their Nobel Lectures today in Oslo. It was a great day of celebration for the cause of gender equality and democracy. You should read all three lectures in their entirety to give you the full picture of what transpired. The common theme was the power of...
[Shana Tabak is a Visiting Associate Professor of Clinical Law at The George Washington University Law School, where she is also a Friedman Fellow with the International Human Rights Clinic.] Although the field of transitional justice has made great strides in addressing harms perpetrated against women in the aftermath of conflict, this paper argues that transitional justice mechanisms mistakenly rely on...
Yes, at least according to this account by Douglas Gillis in Foreign Policy, the ECCC has been nearly a complete and utter failure (and a waste of money). The main problem seems to be, according to the article, incompetent international judges (or at least one shady German judge). Obviously, the U.N. Secretariat, which was managing this tribunal, seems to have...
