I am a big fan of Laura Rozen's work over at The Cable blog on foreignpolicy.com. She posted a piece late Monday, "Getting to Yes on Middle East Peace Talks," which offers a brief but fascinating peek into the art and science of mediating protracted conflicts -- a topic I have written about here and here....
So says the headline of a WSJ news article today (Monday, August 24, 2009, B1, by August Cole), noting that unmanned aircraft - drones such as the Predator to us civilians, although the Pentagon seems to prefer UMV - are transforming not just the military, strategic as well as tactical considerations, but defense contracting. (PopSci ran a story a little...
Ruth Wedgwood comments at Forbes magazine website on the "compassionate" release of Al-Megrahi from prison in Scotland. I agree overall with Ruth: Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, is now a free man. He was convicted in the specially created Hague trial court by a panel of Scottish judges, and his appeal was rejected by the Scottish appellate chamber. He remained in prison...
[caption id="attachment_9512" align="alignright" width="137" caption=""][/caption] The battlefield robots we have mostly discussed here at Opinio Juris are those that are about remote control - realtime control by a human operator who is not actually in the cockpit of the Predator, for example. We've talked somewhat about autonomy issues and robots - battlefield robots with programming enabling them to be able to...
I want to offer a few thoughts on Dean Edley's email, which I appreciate Deb posting. I am much less impressed by his reasoning than Deb appears to be. (And please, Deb, correct me if I am wrong about that.) At the outset, it is important to note that I think Dean Edley's conclusion -- that Yoo cannot be fired, at...
Cross-Posted at Balkinization Following my testimony last month to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security on military commissions and the like, Senator Kyl (R-AZ) was kind enough to send along some follow-up questions to answer. His first follow-up question was one of the same as one he’d posed in the hearing itself: What if any empirical...
Yesterday, the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission awarded final damage awards for the fifteen partial and final awards on liability it rendered between July 1, 2003 and December 19, 2005. You can access the damages decisions for Eritrea here, and those for Ethiopia here. According to the AP, both sides will accept the awards, but neither is apparently thrilled with...
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative frequently does impressive work; witness the U.S. WTO victory this week over China. But when it comes to openness and transparency, USTR's efforts do not have the same shine; this is an agency notorious for its resistance to traditional inter-agency procedures (e.g., the C-175 procedure), let alone opening up its work to the public eye. So, I...
The WSJ has a very important (and certain to be much debated) story today on the front page, "A Global Surge in Tiny Loans Spurs Credit Bubble in a Slum," WSJ, A1, Thursday August 13, 2009. Also see the follow on stories, "Group borrowing leads to pressure," which is about the problem that when you use 'peer pressure' rather than...
I know how much our readers like pirates, so I thought I would share the State of Victoria's remarkably loony criminal statutes on the subject. Here is s70B of the Crimes Act 1958: A person commits a piratical act if...
In case this is of interest to Opinio Juris readers, I want to point out that I have a new essay posted to SSRN entitled Hearts and Minds and Laws: Legal Compliance and Diplomatic Persuasion. Here's the abstract: This essay, written for the South Texas Law Review’s Ethics Symposium, considers the role of international legal argument in the war on terror...
Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban commander who orchestrated, among many other things, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and many other atrocities, is dead. The initial, somewhat confused reports expressed some doubts, but experts are gradually concluding that a US Predator missile strike killed him. At the strategic level, this is one area in which the US is having success. One can find...
