Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
05 Feb The DoJ White Paper’s Confused Approach to Imminence (and Capture)
...would talk. Sometimes it was with regard to holes in laws passed by Congress that were due to Congress having overlooked the implications of the laws for Americans living abroad. At the end of the 90’s I believe there were estimates that 10 million Americans lived abroad. These included soldiers and people with the government, but the vast majority were private citizens finding their bliss by having these international careers (Obama’s mother as an example, but also corporate types being sent to foreign offices, lawyers in lawfirms, etc). Being evaluated...21 Jan Did the Gbagbo Majority Get the No Case to Answer Standard Wrong?
...— as Paul rightly does in his conclusion — that if the Majority did depart from the Ruto standard, it had every right to do so. Trial Chambers are bound by decisions of the Appeals Chamber; they are not bound by the decisions of other Trial Chambers. So, in the absence of an Appeals Chamber decision, there is nothing inherently wrong with one Trial Chamber taking a different approach than one of its predecessors. It might be a good idea for Trial Chambers to generally follow the approach taken by...
14 Aug Ukraine and the Venice Commission: A Pattern of Mutual Influences over the Last Decade
while acknowledging that the reflection needs to be continued, not least in the light of the future experience in fighting oligarchic influence.” (Opinion CDL-AD(2023)018, para. 24) Furthermore, the Commission distinguished between two approaches to de-oligarchization: the “systemic” and the “personal” approaches. The systemic approach encompasses an array of legal tools in many fields of law, including antitrust, taxation, anti-monopoly to political parties, elections and media legislation. This is the approach currently favored by the Commission. The personal approach, by contrast, seeks to identify the people who are viewed as exerting...13 Nov Bond and the Vienna Rules on Treaty Interpretation
Tomorrow I have the good fortune of participating in the Notre Dame Law Review symposium with leading foreign relations scholars. The topic of the symposium is Bond v. United States. The keynote will be given by Paul Clement, who won the case for Petitioner. The focus of my discussion will be the relationship between Supreme Court treaty interpretation and the international approach to treaty interpretation. As readers of this blog well know, the Supreme Court has never followed the international approach to treaty interpretation. In the over forty years since...13 Feb Russia’s Short-Sighted Approach to the Georgia Investigation
...ideals of justice,” she said. Assuming the article is correct — and Agenda.ge is, of course, a Georgian news organization — the statement represents a rather baffling shift in Russia’s approach to the Georgia investigation. According to the OTP’s request for authorization to open the investigation, Russia generally cooperated with the ICC during the preliminary examination, including providing the OTP with 28 volumes of evidence concerning Georgian attacks on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia. Given that the Pre-Trial Chamber has authorized the OTP to investigate those attacks (para. 29), Russia’s...08 Oct Guest Post: On ‘Humanitarian Intervention’, ‘Lawmaking’ Moments and What the ‘Law Ought to Be’–Counseling Caution Against a New ‘Affirmative Defense to Art. 2 (4)’ After Syria
illegality rule, but proposes a differentiated treatment as to the consequences of intervention. This logic might be somewhat closer to existing status quo of the law in terms of its approach. But it remains questionable whether it should be applied to the mix of justifications for strikes used in the Syrian context. 4. From ‘law-breaking’ to ‘lawmaking’ A final problem of Koh’s argument is his approach towards ‘lawmaking’. Syria may indeed provide a momentum for further ‘lawmaking’. But the fundamental question is whether such initiatives should focus on the framework...25 Oct Theories of Corporate Liability in the ATS, a Quick List
who or what is liable, becomes a matter of US domestic civil law (with several variations, looking to federal common law or something else, but leaving aside those complications). This makes corporate liability the “hinge” that “swings” between the international law prong of the ATS and the US domestic law prong in tort. The objection is what I already noted above, the “acts” are only a “violation of international law” insofar as they are committed by something or someone legally capable of violating international law. (This is roughly the approach...28 Jan Barrett Commentary to “The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law”
international law is constructed very differently than domestic law. It is not written down from above, as it were, but bubbles up from below. International law is created, but not always deliberately; it emerges, but not entirely randomly. It establishes the “rules of the game” of international relations but the rules are evolving and not always clear, and the process that gives rise to these rules is also changing—really co-evolving with the rules themselves. For all these reasons, international environmental law can be difficult to pin down. But it’s important,...16 Oct Jens Iverson Guest Post: The New Haven School on Syria–Observing Professors Koh and Stahn
identifies a number of commitments the School has made, including normative values and connecting law and policy. He emphasized that competing schools of international law such as those espousing a commitment to a “new sovereigntism” hold a depressing vision of international lawyers as yes men or scriveners, rather than architects, public servants, or simply “lawyers as leaders.” In Koh’s 2001 An Uncommon Lawyer, he lovingly recalls examples of lawyers as “moral actors” who “guide the evolution of legal process with the application of fundamental values.” In one of the most...
05 Oct Trump vs. International Law: Unilateral Use of Force
[Dire Tladi is a Professor of International Law at the University of Pretoria.] Introduction I first met Harold Hongju Koh in 2009 at a retreat on the definition of the crime of aggression for the purposes of the Rome Statute just outside New York. From my first engagement with him, I immediately knew two things about the man. First, our approaches to international law were based on very different philosophies. Second, his intellectual grasp of the complexities of international law, and its interaction with policy considerations, was remarkable. It is...