In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Imagining Sovereignty, Managing Secession (and Fourth Generation Warfare)

23 Feb

I have posted to SSRN an article I recently published in the Oregon Review of International Law, entitled Imagining Sovereignty, Managing Secession:The Legal Geography of Eurasia’s "Frozen Conflicts." This article was written for a symposium on law and geography at the University of Oregon Law School that was organized by Hari Osofsky (of IntLawGrrls). I use my article to argue that...

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22 Feb

My apologies for the light posting lately.  Getting settled in Melbourne -- and preparing to teach Australian criminal law -- has been very time consuming.  My new email address is kheller@unimelb.edu.au.  Feel free to write! I'll be back to posting regularly soon.  In case you just can't wait that long -- hi, mom! -- here is a link to an hour-long...

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22 Feb

The Washington Post has an interesting story in the Sunday, February 22, 2009, edition (A16) by its longtime UN reporter, Colum Lynch, "With Rivals in Key Posts, U.S. Faces Hurdles at U.N."  The article points out that many key UN posts are occupied by countries, and often individuals, hostile to the United States.  The General Assembly, for example, is headed by...

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21 Feb

Again, this news is not exactly shocking: The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.In a two-sentence filing late Friday, the Justice Department said that the new administration had reviewed its position in a case brought by...

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19 Feb

As this BBC report suggests, investigating war crimes in the Israel-Gaza conflict is a pretty much hopeless task because there is no single entity with the expertise, knowledge, and legitimacy to find out the "truth."  Any investigation, whether it is the UN or the ICC or Human Rights Watch, will be simply dismissed by the two sides as biased.  So...

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18 Feb

It’s not as though this is a new problem in American rights law. The expansion of defenses like qualified immunity for federal officials, the statutory restrictions on collateral federal review of state criminal convictions with constitutional infirmities, the stark limitations on common law constitutional remedies in the courts – all of these areas of doctrine accept the idea that...

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17 Feb

This story in the continuing saga of Bowoto v. Chevron should give human rights litigants pause: Chevron Corp., which prevailed in a human-rights lawsuit seeking to hold it responsible for the shooting of Nigerian protesters at an oil platform, is seeking nearly $500,000 in legal costs from the villagers who brought the suit. Chevron's claim for reimbursement, filed in...

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17 Feb

Last week I posted this excellent essay by Professor Kontorovich of Northwestern Law arguing that the anti-piracy efforts are unlikely to succeed as currently constituted.  One problem I've noted is that there is no obvious place to try captured pirates from Somalia.  The U.S. Navy's plan is to try pirates in nearby Kenya.  As this WSJ article suggests, this strategy is...

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15 Feb

In an effort to put its sordid past behind it -- Nisour Square was so 2007 -- Blackwater Worldwide has announced that it shall henceforth be referred to not as "Blackwater," but as "Xe" -- pronounced like the letter "Z." But why stop there?  Why not go full Prince and replace the Blackwater name with a symbol that represents what the...

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11 Feb

There is an interesting discussion going on at Alex De Waal's blog Making Sense of Darfur about the various theories of liability that might be used to hold Bashir responsible for genocide.  The discussion as a whole is well worth checking out; what I want to discuss here is whether Bashir could be convicted of genocide via JCE III, so-called...

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