Dapo Akande, who seems to know more about head of state immunity than anyone else, has an interesting post on the recent ICC Appeals Chamber non-decision decision in the case against Sudan's President Bashir. He points out that the Appeals Chamber failed to even mention the question of head of state immunity, which is important in this case because as...
That's the allegation made by Dr. Karin N. Calvo-Goller, a senior lecturer at the Academic Center of Law & Business in Israel, against Joseph H.H. Weiler, a professor at NYU who is the Editor-in-Chief of the marvelous European Journal of International Law. In 2007, globallawbooks.org (GLB), a book-review website associated with EJIL that Professor Weiler also edits, published a negative...
I thank Professor C. Ford Runge for his comment on my article and agree with his analysis that places biofuels within a larger picture. From the Brazilian perspective, such heavy subsidies used by the United States and the European Union constitute the very “Gordian knot” of the negotiations in the Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organization. Naturally, that...
[C. Ford Runge is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law at the University of Minnesota.] Mairon G. Bastos Lima is to be congratulated for his coherent and ambitious proposal to rationalize the governance of biofuels through multilateral applications of the Rio and Good Governance principles. As he correctly observes, biofuels policies are highly nationalistic and lack...
[Mairon G. Bastos Lima is a PhD researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.] I thank the moderators of Opinio Juris for giving me this opportunity to reflect upon my article, entitled 'Biofuel Governance and Interational Legal Principles: Is It Equitable and Sustainable?'. Global climate change, energy insecurity, and the underdevelopment of rural areas have been crucial...
Here's a wonderful story from my friend and former student Jeff Cook on the wonderful work he is doing in Cambodia with International Justice Mission to fight child prostitution. Jeff Cook is a former law clerk to Judge Urbina in Washington, D.C. and a former associate at O'Melveny & Myers. Here is Jeff's account of the conviction of...
[Daniel Abebe and Jonathan S. Masur are Assistant Professors of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Their Article may be found here.] On July 8th and 9th, 2009, the New York Times published two seemingly unconnected articles about China. One focused on China’s rejection of an agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions, while the other concerned clashes...
I intend to closely follow the reactions to the Appeals Chamber's decision on the genocide charges against Bashir. The pushback has already begun in a predictable place: the Making Sense of Darfur blog, which has led the charge against the arrest warrant. The post itself, in which David Barsoum asks "what is the ICC really after in Sudan?", is not...
[David H. Moore is a Professor at J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University] The Supreme Court’s decision in Medellin v. Texas has understandably generated substantial debate on the status of treaties in domestic law. Medellin has significant implications for three other areas of foreign relations law as well: Alien Tort Statute litigation, the domestic legal status of customary international...
As I predicted, the Appeals Chamber has rejected the Pre-Trial Chamber's interpretation of the "reasonable grounds" standard: Appeals judges said the court was wrong to conclude in March that there was insufficient evidence to merit charging al-Bashir with three genocide counts. Instead, it had charged him with seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for allegedly...
[Kevin Kolben is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Business School] This Article argues that the move to human rights discourse and international legal institutions by labor scholars and labor movements, particularly American scholars and movements, deserves more reflection, debate, and perhaps reconsideration. Its thesis is grounded primarily in an intuition borne of personal experience. After graduating from college, I worked for several...
[Sean Watts is an Assistant Professor at Creighton University Law School] A stunningly prescient, yet unfortunately anonymously authored, piece in the 1921 British Yearbook of International Law, argued that the application of science to warfare would inevitably lead to more destructive and intolerable forms of war. From this gloomy premise, the author concluded that efforts to develop laws of war were...
