Within the context of our roles as part of a research group at Princeton’s Center for Theological Inquiry, Mary Ellen and I have had many wonderful conversations about natural law as a source for international law. My sense is we both share the view that natural law could be such a source, and we have discussed various instances...
Salon.com has an article today about the Obama administration and torture that floats the horrifying possibility -- all too real, I'm sure -- that Bush will issue a blanket pardon for "anyone who participated in, had knowledge of, or received information about Bush's interrogation program during the so-called war on terror." I'm not going to waste precious pixels responding to...
The AP is reporting that the Trial Chamber lifted the stay "after the prosecution agreed to let judges review confidential material it received from the United Nations." No additional information is available yet; it will be interesting to see what the Chamber does about the documents that are still protected by confidentiality agreements -- an issue I discussed here. UPDATE: According...
In response to Will Fettes’s thoughtful comment: The problem is not with positivism per se but positivism alone. By the 1960s, certainly in the United States there was a view that only positive law theory explained law and positive theory relied on the existence of the usual legal institutions—with their absence on the international plane, positivists could not understand how...
US Navy vessel confronts Somali pirates, 2006. Photo credit Chief Petty Officer Kenneth Anderson, USN, open access DOD (no, not me, but we Ken Andersons really get around). Somali pirates strike again, this time hijacking a Saudi-owned tanker off the coast of Kenya. The running stand off with the hijacked ship carrying arms and a Ukrainian crew continues; Russia announces that...
President-elect Obama’s campaign for the presidency was all about change—change we can believe in. No doubt the readers of Opinio Juris have a long list of topics on which they wish to see change: Guantanamo Bay, CIA interrogation, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Congo, Darfur, weapons proliferation, the global environment, the global economy, etc. But even if the new President...
John has kindly agreed to let me post his private response to my previous post about his speech at the Fletcher School. Before I do, though, I want to reiterate how important it is to not let the US's refusal to join the ICC blind us to the many significant contributions the US has made, and continues to make, to...
Even though my recent posts on the "frozen conflicts" have actually been on the not-so-frozen conflict in South Ossetia, we should not forget the ongoing situation in Moldova. In fact, the new issue of The Economist has a short piece reminding its readers of the ongoing Transnistrian separatist dispute. The quick update is this: while not as heated as the...
As most readers likely know, Germany recently arrested Rose Kabuye, the President of Rwanda's chief of protocol, on behalf of France, who intends to prosecute her for being involved in shooting down then-President Juvenal Habayarimana's plane, the event that triggered the Hutu-led 1994 genocide. It appears that Kabuye actually wants to be prosecuted, because it will give her -- and...
Although the Russian invasion of Georgia this summer has receded from the front pages, it is nonetheless the topic of vigorous debate. At stake is not only how we frame our response to the situation in Georgia, but also how we view our ongoing relationship with Russia. For example, Edward Lucas, the Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist has posted...
I sharply criticized New York Times reporter William Glaberson - the Times's chief Guantanamo reporter - last week for, among other things, failing to take note of Benjamin Wittes and the centrality of his book, Law and the Long War. I am happy to report that Glaberson has a new article out in today's NYT, this time interviewing a wide...
Today is the global financial crisis summit in Washington DC, with attendance by leaders of the G20. Bloomberg reports that the most likely results are: agreement to a global fiscal stimulus aimed supporting aggregate demand while waiting for monetary stimulus (i.e., interest rate cuts by central banks) to take effect; reform of the IMF to put it at the center of addressing...
