I’m grateful to the regulars at Opinio Juris for inviting me to comment on INTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE U.S. SUPREME COURT, because it’s an especially valuable work. I admire the industry displayed by the contributors to this volume. They have gone through a vast number of...
When Bill Dodge, Michael Ramsey and David Sloss approached me to write a chapter for their forthcoming book, I told them that I would be interested in doing so as long as I did not have to rehash the tired contemporary debate about constitutional comparativism. They quickly agreed and I had the good fortune to write a chapter on...
Harlan Cohen and Ingrid Wuerth have provided characteristically insightful comments about the overall strengths and weaknesses of the book. Cohen cautions that its “grand narrative” may make the outcomes of particular cases seem “overdetermined” and suggest that the Supreme Court is more “purposive” about its use of international law than is actually the case. Wuerth tactfully notes that the editors’...
Thank you to Opinio Juris for having me back. It’s always a great pleasure and honor to guest blog at such a terrific forum. The volume of essays under review is an impressive and extraordinarily useful collection. I learned something—and often many things—from every essay I read. I was consistently impressed with how the authors discussed controversial and...
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court, edited by Bill Dodge, Mike Ramsey and David Sloss. Mike has already described the book’s purpose and organizational structure in a post from this morning. My post focuses on some of the book’s overall strengths and perhaps weaknesses. Edited volumes are hard to do...
First, let me start by thanking Duncan and the entire OJ crew, as well as David Sloss, Mike Ramsey, and Bill Dodge, for the opportunity to engage this amazing project. The book is an extraordinary accomplishment, magisterial in scope yet elegant in execution. Pulling together the material here – over 200 years of jurisprudence, countless decisions, and essays...
Three stories to mention. First, Moreno-Ocampo plans to introduce WikiLeaks cables in the trial of the six Kenyan defendants: This emerged as he prepares to hand over the last batch of the evidence he will rely on in the September hearing against three of Kenya’s six post-election violence suspects. The evidence to be released on Wednesday relates to the...
Bloomberg BusinessWeek offers what is slowly becoming conventional wisdom on the ICTY, at least, if not international criminal justice in general. Credit [] is due to the court, which focused on individual responsibility rather than collective guilt. This helped foster reconciliation among Serbs, Croats and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. But beyond the Balkans, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the...
U.S. opponents of UNCLOS, whom I think have a number of quite sensible points, do need to explain how the U.S. is going to operate effectively in a world where all other major seafaring nations belong to the UNCLOS system. And they have offered decent arguments. Customary international law already guarantees navigational rights. Bilateral treaties, or even unilateral declarations, can...
Nicaragua may vote on a referendum on whether to seek damages from the U.S. arising out of the 1980s civil war. I have grave doubts about Nicaragua's ability to win such a claim (as well as its method of calculating damages), but it might be an interesting case. Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega has proposed a referendum on whether to demand $17bn...
Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation passes along this useful review of the effect of UNCLOS ratification on U.S. development of its extended continental shelf. It argues that if the U.S. joins UNCLOS, it could be obligated to turn over as much as 7 percent of royalty revenue derived from development of its extended continental shelf to the International Seabed...
Or so it would seem, based on this analysis from the European Center for Law and Justice, a right-leaning public interest law firm. A proposed new law in Poland appears to ban abortion under any circumstance, thus replacing the current law, which allows exemptions for the mother's health and for cases of rape and incest. If, as the ECLJ argues,...
