Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

...pull the state to account, and even provide policy tools to respond to the emergency.  This introduction opens the symposium on Advisory Opinion AO-32/25 on the Climate Emergency and Human Rights. It sets a program for sustained, diverse, and rigorous debate on the opinion’s implications, legal significance, and next steps. In this first phase, eight Latin American scholars examine core legal questions raised by AO-32/25. Their essays supply a baseline for further engagement and invite refinement, contestation, and alternative doctrinal or implementation proposals.  In this contribution, I provide a concise...

...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...

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...

[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...

...should not turn a blind eye to the all-encompassing role of classism (pp. 63-64). As Nicos Poulatzas aptly noted, the idea of class has many ‘instances’, even if the economic instance remains dominant. If law, including international law, serves a specific social function, constituting the legal subjects qua formally and abstractly equal and free agents who could execute legal transactions, a proper discussion of positionality cannot address only one aspect of this ideal-typical subject. At first blush, it might seem inapposite to argue that international law constitutes international lawyers as...

...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...

[201]). In his contribution to this symposium, Colonel (ret.) Randall Bagwell confirms this understanding when he states, for instance, that unit and individual self-defence are “merely national self-defense exercised by different tiers of actors”. Unresolved questions and unintended consequences Nevertheless, the notion of on-the-spot self-defence by military units does not sit well with other applicable cases. In Nicaragua, the International Court of Justice excluded “mere frontier incidents” from the definition of armed attacks (para. 195). This leaves unit-level self-defence, and by implication individual-level self-defence, in limbo. While an attack that...

The Yale Journal of International Law is pleased to inaugurate its partnership with Opinio Juris in this first online symposium. This week’s symposium will feature three articles recently published in Vol. 33-1 of YJIL, available here. Our discussion today will focus on the controversies that have arisen over attempts by states to regulate their citizens’ wearing and display of religious symbols. In his article, Suspect Symbols: Value Pluralism as a Theory of Religious Freedom in International Law, Peter Danchin (U. Maryland) looks to cases from France, Turkey, Germany and America,...

symposium as an edited book, although there will be no obligation to publish. Conversely, the organizers are happy to consider contributions to the book from scholars who are unable to attend the symposium. If you are interested in presenting a paper at the symposium or contributing to the planned book, please send a 300-500 word abstract and a short C.V. no later than 15 June 2011 to Kevin Jon Heller, c/o James Ellis (j.ellis@student.unimelb.edu.au). Doctoral students are welcome to submit abstracts. Participants will be selected by July 1 to facilitate...

...cyberspace. LJIL is now available on Westlaw and its readership extends well beyond the borders of Europe. It is also taking the lead, with other European journals, in trying to define a coherent policy in relation to free online repositories such as SSRN. And finally, this first online symposium in collaboration with Opinio Juris marks LJIL’s discovery of the world of online blogging. Larissa’s editorial discusses the possible interaction between traditional legal scholarship and expert blogging, issues debated last year by LJIL’s other Editor-in-Chief, Jean d’Aspremont and myself (see here...

Ordinarily I wouldn’t post the table of contents for a symposium in an international law review, but let me herewith make an exception: 10 Chicago Journal of International Law 1 (Summer 2009) Symposium: GREAT POWER POLITICS The Language of Law and the Practice of Politics: Great Powers and the Rhetoric of Self-Determination in the Cases of Kosovo and South Ossetia Christopher J. Borgen 10 Chi J Intl L 1 (2009) Great Power Security Robert J. Delahunty and John Yoo 10 Chi J Intl L 35 (2009) United Nations Collective Security...