I have been resigned to a President Obama for at least a year or more, but the prospect of the real thing is still quite weird. I was, not surprisingly, for the other guy but I am mildly optimistic that a cautious President Obama will not usher in radical change in the areas of U.S. policy toward international law. But...
Just in time for Christmas too. Of course, it was not really him. Rather, it was Judge José Luis Jesus, the newly elected president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). President Jesus addressed the UN General Assembly on December 5, 2008, and met separately with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon a day earlier. Although these annual speeches traditionally provide...
At the risk of contributing further to Ken’s angst about the coming post-Guantanamo future, I thought OJ readers might be interested in this latest entry in the public what-to-do-next discussion. Fordham Law School’s Leitner Center for International Law and Justice has begun posting a series of white papers prepared by various groups of scholars with recommendations about international human rights...
Scott Malcomson, an editor on foreign affairs at the New York Times Magazine, as well as being one of the Really Smart People I Know, had a short, interesting review in the NYT book review, on Sunday, December 14, 2008 of books on humanitarianism and intervention, "When To Intervene." Scott blogs over at HuffPo, but for this book review especially,...
My friend (and OJ alum) Marko Milanovic has a superb post today on the new EJIL: Talk! about the strengths and weaknesses of the Genocide Convention. Here is a taste: Before we ask ourselves whether the Convention does what it was supposed to do, we need to look at what it actually says. And it says very, very little. The definition...
Professor Bobby Chesney of Wake Forest (and the National Security Advisors blog) sends along the following: The 2nd annual National Security Law Junior Faculty Workshop will take place in Austin on March 12 and 13, 2009. This event is unique in that it combines discussion of works-in-progress with training in the law of war provided by instructors from the International Committee of...
A number of readers have e-mailed to ask why, given my interest in all things ICTY, I have not said anything about the Karadzic case. The answer is relatively simple: I have been serving for the past two months as one of Dr. Karadzic's primary legal advisers, which raises a number of complicated issues vis-a-vis blogging. On the one hand,...
How am I going to tie these together, you ask? Just watch...
Treat this as the latest round in the Guantanamo discussion ...
Classes have ended, exams just begun, and I'm feeling into the pedagogy of international law teaching and intellectually shallow, all at the same time ...
In case anyone is interested, here is the text of my Fall 2008 final exam in International Business Transactions. (It's over at my much neglected home blog.) I don’t think this was my greatest exam drafting exercise - I’ve done better in past years. Actually, to be perfectly frank, I think it is not very good at all; I liked...
I don't imagine there is any reader of OJ who is not aware of the suffering and devastation caused by malaria. So this is welcome news. A vaccine against the parasitic disease malaria cut illnesses by more than half in field trials and could be safely given with other childhood inoculations, two studies have reported. The vaccine, which will begin a...
