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

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...

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...

...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...

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...

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...

[Immi Tallgren is docent of international law at the University of Helsinki, researching ICL, the history of international law and feminism. Her latest publication is Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces (OUP 2023). ] I was thrilled to be invited to this symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law (2022). My thrill soon turned to Angst. How to engage with a book like this, to live up to its dazzlingly fluid and distinctive style, its ‘mixology-of-several-disciplines-on-ice’ methodology, and its charismatic author, an...

and Crimea, respectively. I agree with Milanovic that this issue arises in my book but deserves more explicit attention in comparative international law work going forward. In fact, I am currently working on a piece with a colleague addressing this very issue. But I disagree with Ku’s conclusion that adopting a comparative international law approach necessitates descending into pure relativism. As I say in the book, recognizing “differences in the way international law is understood, interpreted, applied, and approached can be examined without adopting a relativist stance that all positions...

left to ask whether the law has anything to offer or if it is complicit in furthering violence and depravation. Does international economic law govern this paradoxical relationship between trade and peace in cases of atrocities? At first glance, one can casually conclude that the law does not seem to enable or oblige the subject of international law to explicitly denounce violent repressive regimes that commit genocidal actions. The Israeli violence in Gaza continues and has spilled over to other territories recently, especially Lebanon but also Yemen. But from a...

[Dr. Tamar Megiddo is a Research Fellow at the TraffLab Research Project at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law.] To suggest in 2019 that international law scholarship remains statist may immediately lift some eyebrows. Although international law scholarship had traditionally embraced a state-centric approach, many have assumed that the field has long left statism behind. In my article Methodological Individualism, forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal, I challenge this assumption. I argue that although mainstream international law scholarship may no longer embrace ontological statism, according to which states are the sole,...

American courts apply international law to facts, they do so as common law courts. Might this explain why Americans sometimes come to different conclusions about what international law requires than do their foreign counterparts? Coupled with the ASIL Annual Meeting topic next year of International Law as Law, I know that there is some significant consternation by international law scholars about these emphases in the United States on a question of international law as law as opposed to the issue of enforcement and compliance with international law. Especially after so...

[Roy is a faculty member at Jindal Global Law School in India. Roy has published under a pseudonym so that they may remain anonymous.] International law school rankings are dominated by institutions in Europe, North America and Australia. As an indication, the previous editions of the Times Higher Education and QS rankings included just one and two law schools from outside these regions in their top 20 worldwide. Law schools in the Global South have become increasingly conscious of their relegation in rankings and the implications this has for their...

lawyers who want to move beyond recovering contingency through historical narratives. I have found her call to explore non-evental aspects of international law helpful in rethinking a talk I gave on “Revolutionary Contingency in International Law: Thomas Sankara, Assassination, & Necropolitics”. Conclusion International law has a grammar, one which can be read and pulled apart in different and revealing ways. I hope that by highlighting the “prepositional thinking” structuring understandings of contingency in international law – namely the “between” and “beyond” approaches – my engagement with parts of this ground‑breaking...