We now know that there is broad agreement that if Texas Governor Perry goes forward with today's scheduled execution of Humberto Leal, he will be doing so in violation of law. Who has said so? Well, the U.S. government, the U.S. Supreme Court, at least three concurring judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, a significant number of members...
The article, Foreign Officials Immunity Determinations in U.S. Courts: The Case Against the State Department, considers the executive branch’s power to make foreign official immunity determinations that are binding in U.S. courts. As many readers know, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act governs the immunity of foreign states in U.S. courts. This statute does not apply to the immunity of individual foreign...
Over the course of the next few days we are pleased to have Ingrid Wuerth discuss her article on Foreign Officials Immunity Determinations in U.S. Courts: The Case Against the State Department. Her article was recently published in the Virginia Journal of International Law. She argues that the text and structure of the Constitution, functional and historical...
I'm under the pump because of a deadline, but I wanted to call readers' attention to a short editorial at OpenDemocracy.net written by Victor Kattan about the PLO/PA's intention to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize Palestinian statehood in September. Victor discusses a variety of interesting diplomatic and legal aspects of that intention, including the possibility that the PLO/PA...
Last week Julian Ku and I had the pleasure of working with Business Roundtable and a wonderful group of international law scholars--Rudolf Dolzer, Burkhard Hess, Herbert Kronke, Davis Robinson, Christoph Schreuer, and Janet Walker--on a Second Circuit amicus brief addressing the propriety of antisuit injunctions under international law. The amicus brief addresses an appeal of Judge Kaplan of the...
Just a quick note for folks following the Congressional wrangling over U.S. military activity in Libya and the War Powers Resolution: later this morning, Opinio Juris' own Peter Spiro will be testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. U.S. State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh is also set to testify and, presumably, defend the Administration's position. Louis Fisher of the...
I am delighted to announce the publication of my book "The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law." The book can be ordered from Oxford University Press here; Amazon should have it (at a whopping $8.78 discount) in the next few days. Here for the last time is the cover: Once again, I want to thank...
Earlier today, the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review (CMCR) held in U.S. v. Hamdan that material support for terrorism is a war crime and thus within the jurisdiction of the military commissions. The decision represents the apotheosis of the US's utterly self-referential approach to international law, because the CMCR managed to reach that conclusion without citing a single non-American...
More than a decade ago, the U.S. Defense Department's Office of General Counsel (DoD OGC) released a detailed analysis of the way international law would operate to guide U.S. military activity in cyberspace. It was an impressive effort and is still worth reading today despite all the intervening, and dramatic, changes in the technology and the geopolitical landscape. At the...
Apologies for the light blogging the past couple of weeks -- although the upside is that I am now officially Dr. Heller, having successfully defended my dissertation at Leiden University in the Netherlands a few days ago. It was an amazing (and amazingly formal) experience, and I'll blog about it once I get the official photos from the university. I've been...
The D.C. Circuit held this week that torture by non-state actors was not actionable under the Alien Tort Statute. The case, Ali Shafi v. Palestinian Authority, arose from the alleged torture in the West Bank by the Palestinian Authority and the PLO of a Palestinian national who was an Israeli spy. The Shafis argue that “the [Palestinian Authority's] conduct...
Those who have followed the cases relating to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) here in the United States and at the ICJ know that the United States has a compliance problem. The United States does not provide the 'judicial review and reconsideration' remedy that the ICJ has indicated is required in the event a violation of an...
