In association with the International Commission of Jurists

‘Fly Me to the Moon: How Will International Law Cope with Commercial Space Tourism?’ by Steven Freeland

23 Nov

[Steven Freeland is a Professor in International Law at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, Visiting Professor of International Law at the University of Copenhagen, a member of the Space Law Committee at the International Law Association, a member of the Directorate of Studies at the International Institute of Space Law and a Faculty Member of the London Institute of...

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23 Nov

Dr Jean-Marc Coicaud is one of the more thoughtful and reflective UN officials, and his response shows why. Broadly speaking, I agree with all three of his comments The conceptual, political and operational relationship between law and legitimacy will be treated differently by political and legal theorists. For some, lawfulness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of legitimacy. For...

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23 Nov

[Dr Jean-Marc Coicaud is the Director of the United Nations University Office at the United Nations in New York.] Professor Thakur highlights what he claims to be today the weak legitimacy of the United Nations. He does so not only by stressing the gap between the principles upon which the legitimacy of the UN is meant to be based and reality,...

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23 Nov

[Ramesh Thakur is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.] The UN is the site where power should be moderated by lawful authority. Legitimacy connects authority to power. The greater the gap between power and justice in world affairs, the greater the international legitimacy deficit. The...

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22 Nov

So thinks James P. Rubin in an Op-Ed in today's NY Times.  His argument comes in two parts.  First, a minority of the Senate plays an obstructionist role, which means that the United States simply doesn't join important treaties:  For much of the world, treaty ratification is a simple matter. In parliamentary systems like those in Britain and France, ratification is virtually automatic,...

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18 Nov

I don't have time to respond to the Ghailani verdict, which Julian notes below.  I would simply direct readers to Ben Wittes' superb post at Lawfare, in which he criticizes those who view the verdict as a vindication of the military commissions.  Here's a snippet: Second, it really is not clear that prosecutors would have fared better in a military...

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15 Nov

Gotta say, even though I write about issues of self-determination, secession, and statehood, I didn't expect to read this on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times: At a glance it looked like any small-town fair, with smoke wafting from the barbecue, families gathering around picnic tables, music percolating over loudspeakers and doting parents...

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12 Nov

While doing research for an essay on sentencing and the rights of defendants in international criminal law -- my contribution to the international law/Islamic law conference to which I'm now heading -- I stumbled across an exceptional essay by Shahram Dama, a professor at John Marshall Law School.  Here is the abstract: Although ranking among the most fundamental principles of criminal...

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11 Nov

This is a wild tale of self-execution (which, I'm fairly sure, is the first time anyone has used the adjective "wild" to describe the self-execution concept).  For years, the Bush Administration sought to get the U.S. Congress to amend the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) to ease licensing restrictions on arms exports to two of the United States' closest allies -- the...

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