Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
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...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...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...
22 Aug Symposium on The Sentimental Life of International Law: ‘The Sentimental Life of International Law’ Travels
[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...09 Feb Is International Law International? Continuing the Conversation
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...
11 Oct Rethinking International Law After Gaza Symposium: Trade, Resistance and International Law – Responding to Atrocities
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...
05 Aug Emerging Voices: Methodological Individualism
[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,...29 Jan The Relevance of International Law to (the Substantive and Procedural Rules of) Preventive Detention in Armed Conflict – A Rejoinder to Al-Bihani
law from international law, it applies or observes existing international law in appropriate cases in the absence of an applicable domestic law or other controlling public act of the government. In other words, as Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. at 700, attempted to make clear, international law “must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination.” Additionally, customary international laws governing war were not applied “by analogy” in non-international armed conflict. The...08 Jul Emerging Voices: A View from Early Modern Cultural Studies on Fragmentation and the Law of Nations
Koskenniemi explains, can now be “narrate[d] as part of a different set of human pursuits, values, and priorities,” including trade law, transport law, environmental law, law of the sea, or human rights. Koskenniemi’s account of jurisdictional and normative fragmentation usefully captures two main insights, first, that narrative—story—plays a critical and maybe increasing role on what is notably called the “international stage”; and secondly, that the stories we tell and the ways that we tell them have legal, social, economic, and political consequences. Robert Cover’s foundational essay “Nomos and Narrative” (pdf)...