Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris, I am pleased to annouce that the first annual Opinio Juris on-line symposium, “Challenges to Public International Law,” will be held this fall. The details below will be posted on our sidebar for future reference. Opinio Juris Online Symposium 2006: Challenges to Public International Law Theme Statement As long as people have been writing about public international law, commentators have suggested that it is a system in crisis or somehow under stress. After a moment of optimism at the end of...

...post is the first in a series of blogs ] That the effectiveness of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) faces challenges from different quarters is not news. It is, rather, an observation that has been made by scholars and practitioners alike – to the point of tritness. Whilst we deeply acknowledge the importance of discussing the manifold challenges to humanitarian norms in times of armed conflict – not least because tailored strategies must be designed to address them – this Symposium also serves another purpose:...

[Elena Baylis is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh] In my role as commentator for the in-person symposium that preceded this online symposium, I took on the task of identifying common themes among the symposium papers. This essay focuses on a few of the ideas drawn from the papers as a whole. Treating international law as behavior engenders several kinds of complexity centered on a set of classic epistemological questions: what do we know and how do we know it? By using theoretical and methodological approaches drawn...

...of the individual as the centre of his claims. Whether one agreed or disagreed with his views, his writings, decisions, and opinions shaped the direction of international legal scholarship, particularly in the Global South. In Latin America, he will be long remembered as a key figure of the Latin American approach to international law, even by his critics. Given his influence in the discipline, we at Afronomicslaw, Opinio Juris and Agenda Estado de Derecho have decided to partner to host a joint symposium to both honour and discuss his legacy...

[Peter Margulies is a Professor of Law at the Roger Williams University School of Law focusing on the balance of liberty, equality and security in counter-terrorism, and author of Law’s Detour: Justice Displaced in the Bush Administration (NYU Press 2010).] The days of Donald Rumsfeld chiding “Old Europe” are gone, but targeted killing has renewed debate on counter-terrorism strategies between the US and Europe. Boundaries of the Battlefield, a symposium sponsored last week by The Hague’s Asser Institute and coordinated by Asser researcher and Opinio Juris contributor Jessica Dorsey, offered...

...all, can we expect a legal system to respond to contemporary challenges if it is based on a partial account of reality? Psychologists will tell us that narratives are necessary cognitive tools for humans to cope with the complexity of navigating everyday life; there is simply too much information for us to process. But what is it our narratives are filtering out, are they safeguarding us from complexity or inconvenient realities? I have raised a variety of questions here, and the contributions to this symposium raise many more – all...

Introduction to the Symposium on Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch (eds), International Law’s Invisible Frames: Social Cognition and Knowledge Production in International Legal Processes (OUP 2021) [Alexandra Hofer is an assistant professor in public international law at Utrecht University and affiliated researcher at the Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI)] In their thought-triggering project, Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch bring together sixteen chapters that, each in their own way, aspire to reveal international law’s invisible frames. The editors define frames as “mental patterns, such as patterns of attention, language, metaphors,...

...esteemed scholars and practitioners were willing to take part in this joint Opinio Juris and EJIL:Talk! symposium and offer their responses to arguments put forward in my article for the current issue of EJIL, giving me and other readers refinements and additions that will enrich the larger conversation of which this symposium is a part. The six commentators raise many issues, which I will address under three broad headings of power, history, and method. Each also brings to their paper a certain optimism or pessimism about what the future may...

This post is part of the HILJ Online Symposium: Volumes 54(2) & 55(1). Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. The HILJ Online Symposium is a week-long discussion by scholars and practitioners on selected print articles from the Harvard International Law Journal. The Symposium takes place on the Opinio Juris website once or twice a year and features responses by scholars and practitioners selected by the Journal and sur-responses by the original authors. The schedule for HILJ Online Symposium: Volumes 54(2) & 55(1) is...

...concrete legal challenge. In doing so, I follow and summarize the approach and main line of argument of my recent book on the topic. The claim is: If we want to convincingly argue for extraterritorial human rights obligations at the legal level, we need to base this on a justificatory normative theory. The question of extraterritorial human rights obligations has, up until today, mostly been discussed within legal scholarship, initiated in the late 1990s (see the introduction to this symposium by Durmuş). The impressive body of research developed over the...

...work, and, even better, that EJIL Talk! is making drafts of these papers publicly available while the editorial process is on-going. Here’s how Marko describes it: I am happy to announce that the EJIL will be publishing a symposium on the International Law Commission’s Guide to Practice on Reservations to Treaties. The symposium was edited by Linos-Alexandre Sicilianos and myself, and features contributions from Alain Pellet, Michael Wood, Daniel Mueller, and Ineta Ziemele and Lasma Liede. It will most likely be coming out in issue 3 of this year’s volume...

[Lori F. Damrosch is Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization and Hamilton Fish Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at Columbia Law School] My article, ‘The Impact of the Nicaragua Case on the Court and Its Role: Harmful, Helpful, or In Between?’ originated as a contribution to a symposium convened on the 25th anniversary of the delivery of the merits judgment in the case. I took as my starting point one of the statements issued by the US government while the case was pending, which had predicted...