Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
08 Oct Trump vs. International Law: Exploiting the Legal Gaps Left by the Obama Administration
effort.” Just like people develop habits of behavior that become ingrained and harder to change the longer we repeat them, so nation-states develop patterns of behavior that become part of the fabric of social and political expectations and become difficult to break. Indeed, this is critical to the development of international law, particularly because customary international law is based on how nations behave and interpret the law. The more nations interpret international law to forbid extrajudicial killing, for example, and better yet enforce the law, the more the law “sticks”...
24 Oct In a World of Warners, Be like Elle
and protect the community. Krieger and Sheldon refer to these as intrinsic motivations and argue that law school teaches its students to focus on extrinsic motivations – attaining clerkships and coveted top tier law firm graduate roles. Law school as a result shifts students’ motivation for studying and practicing law from one of personal rewards to more tangible rewards such as prestige, power, and financial gain. This leads to a substantial decline in student wellbeing as competition and individualism is encouraged. This environment contributes to negative experiences that law students...
14 Feb Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: Of Rules and Exceptions in Jus ad Bellum
[Mohamed S. Helal is Associate Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University; and member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration as well as of the African Union Commission on International Law.] Agatha Verdebout’s Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: The Narrative of Indifference is an exhaustively researched and lucidly written volume that makes important contributions to both the history and historiography of international law. It problematizes the dominant storyline about the evolution of jus ad bellum. It challenges the claim that, before the 20th...
03 Nov Third Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: When Toasters Commit Genocide – Law, Public Institutions, and Society Under Threat of Extinction
of this emphasises that BSG portrays a group of humans who (at least initially) operate in an environment with a limited system of ‘law’. Such analysis suggests that a legal system, or at least one based on the ‘rule of law’ is one of the things which is stripped away when humanity ‘is reduced to essentials’. We contend that one of the things BSG is, in fact, exploring is how society and law respond to a continuing threat of swift and immediate societal level extinction. How do Public Law Institutions...12 Feb Events and Announcements: 12 February 2023
to bilateral and multilateral treaties in the field of private international law. The aim of the conference is two-fold: to encourage specialists of private international law to reassess the importance of the issues that surround the coming into existence of private international law treaties and their operation under public international law; and to discuss whether, and to what extent, the law of treaties applies in the area of private international law in a way that reflects the peculiar features of private international law. For information and registration, see here. Panel...15 Jan Armed Conflict With Al Qaida?
My next three posts will cover issues relating to the law of war. I know that many people have objected passionately to some of the Administration’s policies and legal positions relating to detainees. I have heard many assertions that U.S. detainee policies violate international law, and I must say that I think many of the criticisms are based on an inaccurate understanding of applicable international law or on aspirational statements of international law as critics wish it were, rather than as it now exists. I am not going to try...07 Feb Volokh’s Call Against Judges Who Use International Law
...of whether they agree with the substance 3) Those who think international law should play at most a minor role in the interpretation and formation of domestic law, regardless of whether they agree with the substance I suggest you add a third category, those who believe in international law and treaty law in general, but believe customary international law has no role in domestic decisions. The Emperor I suggest you add a third category, those who believe in international law and treaty law in general, but believe customary international law...16 Jan The State Department and the War on Terror
Some of the commenters have been trying to prod John Bellinger to discuss the administration’s internal arguments about the legal approach to the war on terror. Of course, he cannot comment on these matters, but we should not let that stop us from discussing them. Media reports about the debates about international law within the administration appear to reveal three camps. The OLC took the most extreme pro-executive position, arguing that international law (and domestic law!) placed few or no constraints on the president’s authority. The State Department took the...02 Mar Russia Reminds the World (and International Lawyers) of the Limits of International Law
JNB I'm relatively new to world of int'l law, but I must ask what is the obsession with pointing out that states don't always obey international law? It seems to be the center of so many discussions. Of course it is an important observation, but it is not the only issue. Scholars of criminal law don't sit around and wonder (to the same degree) why people still murder. If states always obeyed int'l law, then there would be no need to have the law (bc laws criminalize acts at the...
29 May Affective Justice Symposium: An Anthropology of International Criminal Justice Across Multiple Scales–A Response to Commentaries
pertinent to the various ways that justice is made real through contemporary emotional regimes, affects, and biopolitical instrumentalities. In raising his critique, Zenker is not fully convinced and proposes that book may have possibly missed the chance to fully appreciate the ironic, if not paradoxical, potential of law. In response, I would remind the reader that law’s emancipatory potential is not in its structure or form. Rather, law’s potential is in its ability to bring about possibility. But this is also its limit. Law’s frameworks – its structures and assumptions...