Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
16 Oct Comment on What’s at Stake in the Sovereignty Debate?
All Mi T The way things are going with the economy, debate aside, I would not be surprised if the next step over here will be martial law http://rawdawgb.blogspot.com/2008/10/next-stop-martial-law.html...
09 Mar Article 103 to the Rescue: A Few Thoughts on the Legality of Russian Claims Under the Genocide Convention, Jus Cogens Duties and Preventive Self-defense
[Moisés Montiel Mogollón is a lawyer advising individuals, companies, and States on matters of international law, human rights, and other international areas at Lotus Soluciones Legales . He is an Adjunct Professor of International Law at Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City) and Universidad Panamericana (Guadalajara).] In the wake of the Russian invasion on Ukraine, which the UN General Assembly has already politically qualified as an act of aggression, and, as Ignacio de Casas has pointed out, has seen an impressively strategic use of international litigation on the part of Ukraine, the...25 Apr Coming to Terms with Regulatory Power Beyond the State
...or express the capacity of a new, historically cohesive political community (‘Europe’) to rule itself through institutions ‘constituted’ for that purpose. In that critical regard, the leading bodies of the Member States—executive, legislative, and judicial—have remained the political-cultural locus of self-government in the EU. This is true even as the Member States have delegated significant and often autonomous regulatory power to the European level for numerous functional and political reasons. How has European public law come to terms with this separation of power and legitimacy? That is the central question...15 Nov The Preventive Detention Debate Under the Democrats
of certain rights to terrorist suspects that are nonnegotiable in a civilian context. While public opinion data is nuanced, the Bush administration’s supposed menace to civil liberties and human rights has not had traction as an electoral issue; to the contrary, its opponents in Congress have feared electoral retribution for hampering the fight. For prevailing opinion in the academy, the press, and the human rights world, however, the standards of international humanitarian law represent moral absolutes, the administration’s flexible approach to them an affront to the rule of law, and...
26 Sep Jus ad Bellum Under Strain: The Illegality of the June 2025 Strikes and September’s Legal Risk Picture
killing and wounding people. But legally, can Iran’s response be characterized as an unlawful armed attack, given that it was provoked by Israel’s own wrongful use of force? There is an argument that Iran’s counterstrikes, however deadly, were not an “armed attack” triggering Israel’s (or the U.S.’s) self-defense rights, but rather a lawful response by Iran in self-defense to Israel’s aggression. In international law, an aggressor state cannot readily cloak itself in self-defense if the victim of its aggression retaliates. Allowing that would invert the law: the original lawbreaker would...07 Sep From Scandal to Reform at the U.N.
...posted some observations on what private lawyers can bring to public international law. Here is another example. If there’s one thing that private attorneys have been grappling with in recent years (especially in the U.S., which takes financial transparency particularly seriously), it is the elucidation of best practices for financial accounting, disclosures, and decision-making. Some of the insights we have gained due to recent corporate scandals can be put to use in the service of building better international organizations. The U.N. will only be as good as we make it....03 Sep Ben Wittes’ Unconvincing “Hostage-Taking” Analogy (Updated)
Journal: In zones of armed conflict, targeted killing can be a lawful tactic. But outside the context of armed conflict, targeted killing is legal only as a last resort and in the face of a truly imminent threat to life–and then only because the immediacy of the threat makes judicial process infeasible. Outside these narrow circumstances, targeted killing amounts to the imposition of a death sentence without charge, trial or conviction. Ben Wittes disagrees with the op-ed in a post today at the new Lawfare. His argument, however, is unconvincing:...
07 Feb Symposium on Fairness, Equality, and Diversity in Open Source Investigations: The Case To (Re)new Community of Practice for the Open Source Investigative Field
...perpetrators across the globe, a wealth of previously elusive information has opened up to bolster justice and truth-telling efforts, in turn spurring the growth of the open source investigative field over the last decade. However, the existing community of practice in this field is non-functioning. The status quo is for outsider researchers to form an echo chamber, mirroring, contributing to, and entrenching harms already thriving in the documentation-to-justice pipeline. Instead, how do we take good intention and turn it into truly good practice? The issues discussed below demonstrate flawed approaches...08 Jan You Know the Holidays Are Over When
...custody (see S. 147, the Lawful Interrogation and Detention Act of 2009); • House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers proposed legislation to create a National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties, a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to probe Bush administration practices of detainee treatment and warrantless wiretaps; and • Published rumors emerge that Anne-Marie Slaughter (past president of the American Society of International Law and author of, among other works, A New World Order) may be tapped to head the State Department’s big-think Office of Policy Planning....
24 Jul Does the Law have a Place in a World of Buried Bodies?
to avert from the law. Post Gaza, the law’s impartiality and its blindness in the pursuit of justice remain on paper only. In Amarata Sen’s understanding of justice, he argues that professing for ideal justice is limited and exclusionary as it fails to address the everyday injustices faced by people, which hinder the application of the law universally. When discussing the application of international rules and laws the Global South has learnt, through experience, that the social, political and systematic realities of people is the context in which the law...