Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation

approach avoids some of the obvious problems of the Chuidian approach and is more consistent with the position taken by the United States on behalf of its own officials when they are sued abroad. In addition, certain categories of foreign officials are accorded immunity by more specific legal regimes. Diplomatic and consular officers enjoy immunities under the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and on Consular Relations, respectively, bilateral treaties with certain countries, and in some instances customary international law. These sources reflect some of the oldest principles of international law, which...

Tobias Thienel If the aim of international human rights law (I am engaging in teleological thinking here) is to provide full protection, as appropriate to the circumstances, why would it allow for a 'third box'? Human rights law in some parts stops where international humanitarian law takes over, because the latter body provides the more appropriate form of protection, in the circumstances of an armed conflict. No such considerations apply where there is no other form of protection, so why reduce the guarantees of international law? Less theoretically speaking, I...

[Wolfgang Alschner (PhD in International Law, JSM (Stanford)) is a post-doctoral researcher at the World Trade Institute in Bern and the Graduate Institute in Geneva specializing in text as data analysis of international law.] As international law scholars we are overwhelmed with information. The United Nations Treaty Series alone contains more than 50,000 treaties. Add to that the many thousand decisions by international courts and organizations that grow day by day. Just keeping abreast with a sub-field of international law is a full-time job. Not only academics but also beneficiaries...

resolving the conflicts between Israel and other Middle East powers, and that this approach may involve a very different diplomatic approach than that taken by the Bush administration. This did not make Prof. Goldsmith's list but appears to be central to the Obama administration's security strategy in the region. A couple of additional points. While Prof. Goldsmith may be correct on some apparent similarities in secrecy/transparency and the commissions, it is important to consider that the Obama administration has taken initial positions on these matters which will be fleshed out....

Al-Qaeda types of Middle Eastern origin. Or the death penalty cases with Mexico and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. One does see a pattern that successive generations have fought against. And, as with all the legacies of slavery, the utopians have to tell the realists to get their heads straight and bring the United States back into something that complies with basic human rights law and the rule of law - seeing international law as rules of law. Or maybe it is just the optimists in the face of...

...that such operations are conducted in accordance with all applicable law …. Some have argued that our targeting practices violate domestic law, in particular, the longstanding domestic ban on assassinations. But under domestic law, the use of lawful weapons systems — consistent with the applicable laws of war — for precision targeting of specific high-level belligerent leaders when acting in self-defence or during an armed conflict is not unlawful, and hence does not constitute ‘assassination’. Isn’t that what the US government actually thinks is legally correct? Of course it is...

However, if the home-state line ministries were to transpose and streamline these standards through specific domestic law provisions (e.g. procurement, consumer protections, proceeds of crimes laws), they would become as enforceable as any other domestic laws regulating corporate actors to business operations in a settlement (in whatever capacity or manner) by virtue of the legal basis for any activity, transaction or title there being Israeli domestic law. Such measures, intended to guarantee the consistent application of domestic law with public policy by ensuring non-recognition of Israeli unlawful acts as lawful,...

Aaron Ostrovsky Roger, you raise an excellent point in terms of MOA but I think the application to U.S. constitutional law would be different here than in the Lawrence context. The SCOTUS in Lawrence cited Dudgeon to generally support their overturning a law that it saw as based on animus alone. This is a very broad and abstract concept. I don't think the SCOTUS in Lawrence looked to Dudgeon as an argument that we in the US should employ a similar MOA approach (although a very flexible rational basis test...

interpretation. Besides the diversity of the actors, the growing trend towards specialization in international law (mirroring a development in national law a century ago), accompanied by the “tunnel vision” symptom, fostered the emergence of distinct interpretive communities. Such tunnel vision, focusing on the unique goals of each specialization, can lead to the chopping of international law into discrete “blocks”. Consequently, generalist international lawyer idealized in Schachter’s famous “Invisible College of International Lawyers” are an endangered species. Today, there are interpretive communities of human rights lawyers, investment lawyers and environmental lawyers...

...in sources that have a greater historical connection to the intellectual roots of the debates in America, if the purpose is to understand those debates in an American context – Thucydides, or even Machiavelli. Put another way, I don’t really think that Schmitt is comprehensible outside the context of Weimar. Nothing is weirder or more intellectually misplaced to me, these days, than to read somewhere about the “Schmittian” approach to emergency in the Bush administration, for example. No one in the Bush administration had ever read Schmitt, ever heard of...

...Judge Wilkinson’s analysis. First, we can critique it in terms of the extent to which it does or does not in fact reflect IHL principles. Gabor Rona does that here, and we should probably spend some time today grappling with the questions he raises. But for now I want to focus on a second approach, in which we consider Wilkinson’s analysis for its merits either because it may serve as a template for a domestic law solution to the scope-of-detention dilemma, or because it may well catch on as the...

Armed Conflict: An Operational Approach comes to students with stunning authority. All of the authors are active or retired United States Army officers with more than 140 years of collective military operational experience among them. Several have experience in both legal and operational assignments as well. They deliver a comprehensive coverage of all aspects of the law of armed conflict, explaining the difference between law and policy in regulation of military operations. The Law of Armed Conflict provides a complete operational scenario and introduction to the operational organization of United...