Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

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,...

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...

The Virginia Journal of International Law is pleased to continue its partnership with Opinio Juris in this third online symposium. This week’s symposium will feature three articles recently published in Vol. 48-3 of VJIL, available here . Our discussion on Tuesday will focus on the mysterious history of Alexander Nahum Sack, the Russian-born legal scholar whose once obscure theory of “odious debts” has found new life among contemporary proponents of debt forgiveness. In their article, A Convenient Untruth: Fact and Fantasy in the Doctrine of Odious Debts, Sarah Ludington (Duke)...

...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...

[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...

[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...

[Hari Osofsky is Assistant Professor of Law at University of Oregon and a contributor to the Opinio Juris On-Line Symposium. She blogs regularly at IntLawGrrls] I would like to begin by thanking the Opinio Juris bloggers for their hard work in conceptualizing and organizing their inaugural on-line symposium. I very much appreciate the opportunity to participate in it, as well as John Knox’s thoughtful reaction to my piece. This dialogue is a wonderful opportunity for junior scholars to get feedback on their work, and I am certain that my piece...

[Vik Kanwar is a JSD candidate at NYU, a Westerfield Fellow at Loyola New Orleans College of Law and a contributor to the Opinio Juris On-line Symposium] My sincere thanks to Professor Sean D. Murphy for his careful reading of my paper, for his clear exposition of the challenging context in which it is written, and for confirming in my mind the need for further (and more critical) study on this topic. His comments are especially helpful in separating what might be valuable and worth retaining from what might be...

Over the coming week, along with Armed Groups and International Law, we are thrilled to co-host a symposium on Compliance in Armed Conflict: New Avenues to Generate Respect for Humanitarian Norms. Scholars and practitioners who will be weighing in include: Ezequiel Heffes and Ioana Cismas (co-organizers of the symposium), Emiliano Buis, Katharine Fortin, Hyeran Jo, Fiona Terry, Ahmed Al-Dawoody, Jonathan Zaragoza, Yolvi Padilla, Chris Rush, Mohamed Assaleh, Louise Sloan, Ibrahim Salama, Michael Wiener, Nontando Hadebe, Annyssa Bellal, Pascal Bongard, Melina Fidelis-Tzourou, Anki Sjöberg and Anne Schintgen. As this is a co-hosted...

...the terrorism threat that has emerged from the chaos of Syria’s civil war, and that the more immediate threats still come from traditional terror groups like Khorasan and the Nusra Front, which is Al Qaeda’s designated affiliate in Syria. Mr. Fadhli, 33, has been tracked by American intelligence agencies for at least a decade. According to the State Department, before Mr. Fadhli arrived in Syria, he had been living in Iran as part of a small group of Qaeda operatives who had fled to the country from Afghanistan after the...

for anticipatory self-defence? Might not a better analogy be with the law of neutrality? If the law of neutrality is a good analogy, then at least to the extent that the US Field Manual 27-10 accurately reflects the law, if Syria fails for any reason to prevent ISIS using its territory to support ISIS operations in Iraq, Iraq (and its allies) are justified in conducting attacks in Syria. Notably, paragraph 520 of FM 27-10 does not mention any preconditions, such as Iraq calling on Syria first or requesting Syrian consent....

[Marina Aksenova is an Associate Professor of International and Comparative Criminal Law at IE University] The advance of artificial intelligence (AI) represents a seismic shift in how we regulate and structure societies. The question of what keeps us human in the age of algorithmic and synthetic reasoning is then far from trivial. Spontaneous creativity may be one of the answers. This symposium discusses my new book Art, Aesthetics and International Justice (Routledge, 2025). Six wonderful contributions appearing over the course of the next few days engage with the major themes...