My favorite part of the Wall Street Journal's article on ATS litigation, discussed by Ken below, has to be this comment by the lawyer who defends such lawsuits: In assessing liability, a key question can be whether companies assisted a foreign government that was known to violate human rights, says Joe Cyr, a New York lawyer who defends companies against alien...
The WSJ has a news story (Nathan Koppel, "Arcane Law Brings Conflicts From Overseas to U.S. Courts," Thursday, August 27, 2009) on the rise of ATS suits against corporate defendants. It quotes Curt Bradley, but interestingly (I thought, for an area traditionally dominated by academics), it has more quotes from practicing lawyers, including John Bellinger, Center for Constitutional Rights's Katherine Gallagher,...
The local news in New York and New Jersey is abuzz this morning with unconfirmed rumors that, for the opening of this year's UN General Assembly, Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi is planning to stay in an air-conditioned "Bedouin-style" tent on the grounds of a residence owned by the Libyan government in Englewood, New Jersey, a suburban town of 30,000. According...
As an American who has lived and received health care in two other industrialized Western countries (New Zealand and Australia), I know first-hand how pathetic American health care really is compared to its foreign counterparts. Unfortunately, because most Americans know very little about how the rest of the industrialized world provides (vastly superior and much cheaper) health care, conservatives have...
My friend and former colleague at Auckland, Mohsen Al Attar, has posted two new articles about TWAIL on SSRN. The first, co-written with Rosalie Moore, is entitled "TWAIL Revisited - The Bolivarian Reconstruction of International Law." The second, co-written with Vernon Ivan Tava, is entitled "TWAIL Pedagogy - Legal Education for Emancipation." The abstracts are after the jump. I highly recommend...
One of my favorite ICL scholars, Guenael Mettraux, recommends precisely that in a recent New York Times op-ed. Here is the core of his pitch: The Guantánamo detainees pose a similar conundrum today. Trying these men stateside would necessarily require the compromise of long-cherished principles of American law. Yet continuing to hold them without the prospect of a fair trial or...
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...
