I was intrigued by Julian's post on Andrew McCarthy's latest screed for National Review Online, so I read what McCarthy had to say. His argument boils down to this: (1) the Obama administration argues in Demjanjuk that torture is a specific-intent crime; (2) Yoo and Bybee argued in the infamous OLC memos that torture is a specific-intent crime; (3) the...
I've just posted a piece I did for Peggy's (great) Missouri v. Holland conference last year, entitled The Elusive Foreign Compact. Granted I'm weeks (if not months) behind other participants in getting my contribution posted (see, e.g., here and here). Hopefully, however, this is a case of better late than never. For those who might be interested, here's the abstract: This symposium essay identifies...
Invoking the legacy of Nuremberg, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) came out yesterday in support of prosecuting members of the Bush administration responsible for waterboarding. His position on prosecutions is interesting in its own right, but I want to use his comments for a different purpose -- to plug a collection of letters that his father, Thomas Dodd, wrote to his...
The "beautiful game" is what Pele calls soccer (yes, I know, "football" to the rest of the world besides the US). On April 25th, diplomats from the UN, including the Secretary-General, set aside the great game of diplomacy to play a game of soccer at New York's Chelsea Piers to support the non-governmental organization Play31. Play31's website explains that: Play31 was...
It has gone all but unnoticed in the U.S. but Russia has declared victory in its fight against Chechen rebels. Chechnya had become a byword for a place of chaos and random violence perpetrated by all sides, especially since the first Chechen War of 1994-1996. But a recent report by the Times of London concerning Russian black operations in the...
William Ranney Levi's paper on interrogation techniques, Interrogation's Law, is forthcoming in Yale Law Journal, but is up at SSRN. Here is the abstract: Conventional wisdom states that recent U.S. authorization of coercive interrogation techniques, and the legal decisions that sanctioned them, constitute a dramatic break with the past. This is false. U.S. interrogation policy well prior to 9/11 has allowed...
University of Iowa law professor Mark Osiel - an old friend of mine and someone well known to many of us, particularly for his books and writing on mass atrocities - has a new book out, The End of Reciprocity: Terror, Torture, and the Law of War (Cambridge 2009). I've read it at pretty high speed - looking for some...
So I'm not exactly surprised that Obama is planning to revive the use of military commissions to try terror suspects, (according to the NYT). The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself. No doubt there will be some amendment to the Bush commissions,...
[ Laura Dickinson is Foundation Professor of Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.] It seems that in some quarters, support for international law (combined with a little bit of humor) is enough to get one labeled “so out there” to be unqualified for government service. A few commentators on the right have recently decided to attack international...
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a provocative essay by Brian Weeden critiquing the idea that the U.S. should sign on to a treaty banning the weaponization of space. The author's point is not so much that he thinks there should be unregulated military use of space, but rather whether a treaty is the best way to go about...
In case you haven't seen them already, I wanted to point out that Beth Van Schaack and Hari Osofsky have a couple of posts at IntLawGrrls on yesterday's Koh confirmation hearing....
The Eleventh Circuit earlier this month ruled that Manuel Noriega could be extradited to France following the completion of his sentence in Florida. In Noriega v. Pastrana, Noriega argued that under the Third Geneva Convention he was entitled to automatic and immediate repatriation to Panama as soon as his criminal sentence was complete. However, Section 5 of the...
