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20 Dec

[Artur Simonyan is a PhD candidate at the University of Tartu, School of Law.] Introduction Laws that derive from Human Institution are different in different places. Visioned critically, international law likewise shares the same ontology. Both assertions sound equally logical and normatively valid within the dictum ‘all law is law in particular locations’. Nevertheless, supposing that laws’ differences ultimately relate to the human institution, it is syllogistic that jurists –interpreters of that ‘institution’ who, via the production of teachings, enrich sources of international law– are masterminds in the establishment of...
20.12.22 | |

25 Oct

...Reflecting its non-partisan nature, the IAVA reports its grades by state, not by party affiliation. Indeed, the IAVA does not even identify party affiliation on its list; you have to search for an individual member of Congress to learn his or her affiliation. UPDATE 2: One commenter implies that the Republicans might have received lower grades because they voted against trimming “budgetary fat.” Here is a list of some of the measures Lincoln Chafee — the Republican with the best grade, a “C” — voted against; I leave it to...
25.10.06 | |

26 Mar

...state whose national is accused of aggression. With respect to the Chair’s second question, our views are well-known: that investigation or prosecution of the crime of aggression should not take place absent a determination by the UN Security Council that aggression has occurred. The UN Charter confers on the Security Council the responsibility for determining when threats to peace and security, including aggression, have taken place. We are concerned by the confusion that might arise if more than one institution were legally empowered to make such a determination in the...
26.03.10 | |

16 Jul

A Bangladesh war crimes tribunal has found top Islamist party leader, Ghulam Azam, guilty of masterminding atrocities during the 1971 war of independence against Pakistan. Violent clashes occurred after the verdict was announced. Spain has apologized for its part in the events that led Bolivian President Evo Morales’ plane to be delayed earlier this month during an international search for Edward Snowden. Bangladesh approved a labor law to boost worker rights, including the freedom to form trade unions, after a factory building collapse in April killed 1,132 garment workers and...
16.07.13 | |

29 Jul

...or should the U.S. (a) simply assert extra-territorial authority, on the trans-boundary effects rationale; (b) negotiate in advance to establish new international rules regarding cyber-entry and search; or (c) pursue more informal channels of resolving these territorial difficulties? Does the study of territoriality suggest a likely or perhaps a preferable solution? Officials involved in this activity would remain on U.S.soil, and would thus not need the sort of protective bubble SOFAs provide. But in the event agents might travel to any of the territories searched, I wonder if some comparable...
29.07.09 | |

26 Mar

...to deteriorate. The families of the 17 Afghans killed in a massacre allegedly carried out by a US soldier now awaiting trial have received compensation from the US government. On the heels of the viral #Kony2012 campaign, the African Union announced that it will send 5,000 troops to assist American military advisors in the search for the LRA leader, Joseph Kony. Previously undisclosed files from the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in Scotland have been published (full report found here), despite data protection laws keeping them from the public eye. The US...
26.03.12 | |

03 Oct

[Beth Stephens is Professor of Law at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey-Camden.] Monday’s oral argument in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Inc. focused on the search for a coherent limit to the reach of the Alien Tort Statute. The need for some limit is uncontroversial: even the most ardent advocates of human rights accountability agree that not all cases involving human rights violations, no matter how egregious, belong in U.S. courts. The devil, as always, is in the details. Would a holding that the ATS does not apply...
03.10.12 | |

05 Apr

...position—simultaneously adopted by NGOs as a means of gaining admission to officialdom and assigned to them by international organization bureaucracies in search of legitimacy for themselves—on that most highly contested of issues, global governance. Peruzzotti and Charnovitz, in their respective chapters, disentangle these separate issues, accountability from global governance. To the extent they offer or critique policy proposals—such as Charnovitz’s skepticism that NGO regulation can or should somehow seek to force NGOs away from single-interest advocacy—they focus on the issue of accountability rather than representation. These authors would seem to...
05.04.09 | |

08 Apr

...lead sufficient evidence to necessitate a defence case, failing which the accused is to be acquitted on one or more of the counts before commencing that stage of the trial. It therefore considers that the test to be applied for a ‘no case to answer’ determination is whether or not, on the basis of a prima facie assessment of the evidence, there is a case, in the sense of whether there is sufficient evidence introduced on which, if accepted, a reasonable Trial Chamber could convict the accused. Notice the language:...
08.04.16 | |

23 Dec

...– that we are encouraging a meta-conversation within our community about itself. At the same time, 2022 has been a tumultuous year for international law, marked by the COVID-19 Pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the passing of Judge Cançado Trindade. In the spirit of the new year, I thought I’d offer our readers a snapshot of what the year has been like at Opinio Juris, by listing the Top 10 most read articles of 2022. #10 Why 2+4 Does Not Always Add Up: In Search of NATO’s Non-Enlargement Promises,...
23.12.22 | |

17 Apr

[Margaret K. Lewis is a Senior Research Fellow at NYU Law School’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute.] Thank you to the editors of the Virginia Journal of International Law and to Opinio Juris for providing this forum. My article grew out of work on legal reforms in Mainland China, which led to a cross-Strait project. As I learned more about Taiwan’s criminal justice system, I realized that Taiwan’s reform path presents an intriguing story of a legal transplant at a time when systems around the world are increasingly unmoored from the traditional...
17.04.09 | |

09 Jun

...issues of sovereign debt, beyond the dominant dichotomy between the “statist” and “popular” approaches. Her intermediate or “rule of law” framework emerges from an innovative reinterpretation of a landmark opinion by William Howard Taft. Professors Arthur Mark Weisburd (UNC) and Tai-Heng Cheng (New York Law School) will be the respondents. The symposium will conclude on Wednesday with a discussion of The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights: A Concept in Search of Content, by Katharine G. Young (Harvard). In her article, Young, an S.J.D. candidate, explores what she terms...
09.06.08 | |