I have blogged in the past about the growing phenomenon of 'libel tourism' and its chilling effects upon free expression, as well as some (really, considering the free expression issues under threat, quite modest) New York state and US federal legislative efforts to deal with it. It amounts to using English courts and their views on libel, together with the...
The blog Futurismic as an interesting post on "viral sovereignty." According to a recent Washington Post op-ed by Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett: This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations — even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat...
That essentially was the question the Ninth Circuit had to address in the recent case of United States v. Liu. The question arose out of a criminal prosecution by the United States against defendant for running a brothel in Saipan. Defendant argued that the United States had no authority to prosecute her under the commerce clause or the...
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my experiences in Georgia in the early 1990s, monitoring the various conflicts - Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the then-Georgian civil war in Tbilisi. I noted that those secessionist conflicts were marked on each side by ethnic cleansing as extreme as anything I saw in the Yugloslav wars (a country which I also...
This year, I am watching the Olympic Games on television in the United States for the first time since the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. It has been my singular honor to have been selected to be an arbitrator on the ad hoc Division of the Court of Arbitration for Sport at the last four Olympic Games. Serving on...
(First, before anything else, a welcome to Eric Posner back to the blogosphere, lately of Slate's Convictions (in the same shutdown that gave OJ the welcome opportunity to snag Deborah Pearlstein) and now of Volokh Conspiracy, where Eric has been posting particularly related to the resurgence of Russia.) I have been writing in my own draft work this summer about the...
Take a look at this commentary about Russia invading Georgia: In order to be able to deny the invasion of Russian troops, it was first stated that some villages on the Georgian frontier had revolted, embittered by the tyranny of the, Georgians...
I know politics makes strange bedfellows, but this is ridiculous: Two unlikely allies met for breakfast last month in New York to discuss a possible collaboration: Mia Farrow, actress and passionate activist for Darfur refugees, and Erik Prince, founder and CEO of the government contractor, Blackwater Worldwide. Farrow told ABC News that Blackwater, despite its controversial history and allegations of murdering civilians...
I would be remiss if I did not mark, here at Opinio Juris, the fifth anniversary of the tragic death of UN diplomat and humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in the terrorist attack on the UN's Baghdad headquarters in 2003 along with many other aid and relief workers. And also - it receives far less attention, alas -...
I have this gnawing suspicion that the only two law professors deeply interested in battlefield robotics are Glenn Reynolds and me. Nonetheless, when it comes to battlefield bots and the law, you can take satisfaction that you will have Heard It Here First, unless, of course, you read Instapundit. As I've said in earlier posts on this subject (and here and...
The Olympics have been amazing. Great athletes, amazing venues, wonderful organization. The Chinese have much to be proud of. But whatever goodwill that the Olympics have engendered in me is quickly being lost based on their treatment of dissent. The Chinese are being utterly hypocritical in promising to afford opportunities for dissent but not making good...
For anyone following the situation in Georgia and US/ Russian relations, there was a very interesting statement and Q&A today from Secretary of State Rice, who is in Brussels for meetings at NATO. Among other things, she announced the creation of a new NATO-Georgia cooperative framework and also discussed the concerns about isolating Russia. Among other topics, she also answered questions about...
