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

18 Dec

Here’s an extra-long edition of our Events and Announcements for the holidays. Thanks to all our readership for following us on OJ! Calls for Papers The blog IntLawGrrls: voices on international law, policy, practice, will celebrate its first decade with “IntLawGrrls! 10th Birthday Conference” on Friday, March 3, 2017. The daylong event will be held at the Dean Rusk International Law Center of the University of Georgia School of Law, which is hosting as part of its Georgia Women in Law Lead initiative. Organizers Diane Marie Amann, Beth Van Schaack,...
18.12.16 | |

03 Sep

[Rohini Sen is an Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School.] All the Things We Never Say International Law is imperial, colonial, capitalist and patriarchal. A vast array of critical approaches to the discipline have laid bare its Eurocentric foundations and insidious continuum. Yet, while much critical scholarship adequately battle the first two conditions, most are eerily silent on the patriarchal moorings of the discipline. The silence is all the more perplexing since critical international law includes feminist approaches which ably interrogates the place of gender (although my writing here...
03.09.20 | |

13 Apr

Catherine Powell has an essay at Huffington Post responding to those criticizing Harold Koh for his views on customary international law. She writes: Harold Koh’s position that customary international law is a form of federal common law reflects the conventional view since the founding of the nation. For over 200 years, Congress, the courts, and the Executive Branch have recognized that each branch has authority to observe customary international law (or, the law of nations) as part of federal law. Such customary norms include basic rules governing international business transactions,...
13.04.09 | |

19 Apr

that “the customs and usages” of the nations of the world, as revealed in these and other sources, form customary international law entitling them to higher wages. This claim fails because customary international law is not a source of judicially enforceable private rights in the absence of a statute conferring jurisdiction over such claims. See Princz v. Federal Republic of Germany, 26 F.3d 1166, 1174 n. 1 (D.C.Cir.1994) (“While it is true that ‘international law is part of our law,’ it is also our law that a federal court is...
19.04.10 | |

19 Nov

can help these persons understand that international law is OUR law and they as well as us are to comply with that law. Thus, when Chertoff as head of the Criminal Division of Justice gave advice and comfort to torturers in other government agencies by agreeing that if certain harsh interrogation techniques were used then the Criminal Division would not prosecute he should understand that as a matter of domestic (war crimes) and international law that was wrong. But the domestic law doctrine of prosecutorial discretion which might be of...
19.11.06 | |

21 May

...does not claim the right to intervene when purely internal violence conforms to IHL or human rights law, but may intervene when it doesn't (see Libya, Kosovo, etc.). Is this evidence of some form customary international combatant or equivalent functional immunity for the state's leaders and armed forces engaged in purely internal armed violence? Do Gaddafi's ICC charges effectively indicate the removal of a functional immunity recognized by customary international law? Again, I am not making an argument here. I am thinking out loud and welcome your thoughts. Some have...
21.05.11 | |

15 Jul

speech explained that, as you noted, explicitly. There is no debate on that question; there’s no issue about that question." Of course for those who consider international law forms part of American law (you know the pesky treaties we signed on to as well as that pesky customary international law American courts have been braying about since the founders) to say that it is not permitted to use foreign law or international law to interpret the Constitution sounds really weird. The circular logic seems to require the foreign law or...
15.07.09 | |

31 Mar

fundamental tenet of contract law. But perhaps far more consequential for understanding human rights vis-à-vis treaties is to examine the origins of both in natural law principles and values, an historical narrative too often obscured with the entrenchment of positivism in international law scholarship. It is with natural law that we find the first moral support and jurisprudential sanction for the notion of natural rights (all the way back to the Stoics), and it is the Lockean approach to inalienable rights related to this tradition that was of course appropriated...
31.03.06 | |

03 Apr

also surfaces in foreign investment law. In the lex mercatoria we may further find (as in foreign investment law), however, that the law, in as far as we have it, is still insufficiently complete or underdeveloped at the transnational level. When no clear transnational legal regime emerges, we are therefore still relegated to a domestic law as the default rule, in private law found on the basis of the ordinary conflict rules. To me that is fully acceptable and makes for a complete system for those who still think in...
03.04.12 | |

23 Apr

Human Rights Law, NYU Law places its imprimatur not on what Mr. Koh thinks, but rather on what he did. Given Mr. Koh’s role in crafting and defending what objectively amounts to an illegal and inhumane program of extrajudicial assassinations and potential war crimes, we find his presence at NYU Law and, in particular, as a professor of International Human Rights Law, to be unacceptable. Sincerely, The Undersigned [1] N.Y.U. Law Public Interest Law Center, http://www.law.nyu.edu/publicinterestlawcenter [2] N.Y.U. Law, “Harold Koh will visit NYU Law in 2014-15 academic year,” http://www.law.nyu.edu/news/Harold-Koh-Distinguished-Scholar-in-Residence...
23.04.15 | |

12 Aug

...I am explaining to you. Just a few weeks ago, the UN met to come to an agreement on the definition of terrorism to be applied in international law. No such law exists. There are laws on terrorism of assorted varieties from nation-state to nation-state, but there is no universal law binding the global community. Just to give you an example of how marginal international law is, the fact that the UN couldn't come to an agreement on even defining what terrorism is less than one month ago should tell...
12.08.05 | |

04 Aug

extensively during the twentieth century. The three disciplines of international humanitarian law, international criminal law and international human rights law share this aim. However, the International Criminal Court is the only enforcing body for any of the three forms of law. The reliance of international human rights law and international humanitarian law on a domestic court for enforcement can be problematic, particularly in situations such as the examples mentioned above, where the State has little or no control over the non-state actor. It could be argued that international criminal law...
04.08.14 | |