Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

[Andrew K. Woods is currently a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School.] This post is part of the Virginia Journal of International Law/Opinio Juris Symposium, Volume 52, Issue 3. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Let me begin by expressing my gratitude to the Virginia Journal of International Law (VJIL) and Opinio Juris for hosting this discussion, and to Professors Baron, Haque, and Ohlin for their thoughtful responses to my recent VJIL Article. Rather than address every point raised by the comments, I...

Evan Criddle Evan Fox-Decent We would like to begin by thanking Opinio Juris and the Yale Journal of International L aw for hosting this symposium, and Alexander Orakhelashvili for generously agreeing to act as our interlocutor. In international law, the term “jus cogens” refers to norms that are considered peremptory in the sense that they are mandatory and do not admit derogation. In our article, we argue that peremptory norms are inextricably linked to the sovereign powers assumed by all states. The key to understanding international jus cogens lies in...

...the kind of rule of law failures we need to rally against across the world. What such protests show, and this is equally the case in the protests discussed in other contributions of this blog symposium, is how the three values of democracy, human rights and rule of law may work together. Although the rule of law does not easily become the focal point of protest, if things are serious enough – and they currently are – people will take to the streets to defend it. Such rule of law...

This week we will host a mini-symposium on James G. Stewart’s latest article, The Turn to Corporate Criminal Liability for International Crimes: Transcending the Alien Tort Statute. James has been an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at Allard Hall, University of British Columbia, where he as been since 2009. Previously he was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School in New York. He has also been an Appeals Counsel with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and has also worked for...

...justice scholarship already, including Sarah Nouwen’s book Complementary in the Line of Fire, Carsten Stahn and Mohamed El Zeidy’s edited volume The International Criminal Court and Complementarity, and articles by Kevin Jon Heller (see here and here) and William Schabas. De Vos’s book ultimately succeeds in this endeavour by grounding his engagement with the question of complementarity in a novel perspective, namely, by examining the multiple socially constructed meanings of complementarity and their respective implications for building domestic criminal justice systems. The goal of this brief contribution to the symposium...

...not make the bold assertion that the use of her methodology will yield incontrovertible results in all possible instances. More modestly, but probably more realistically, she claims that it provides a shared language and coherent framework for legal analysis and scholarly debate regarding the content of a prohibited ‘use of force’ between States under international law. In that vein, her carefully worded conclusion on page 232 reads as follows:   ‘The framework of type theory has the potential to facilitate clearer analysis of “uses of force” between States. It is...

[Jens David Ohlin is an Associate Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; he blogs at LieberCode.] This post is part of the Virginia Journal of International Law/Opinio Juris Symposium, Volume 52, Issue 3. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Andrew Woods has done an admirable job tackling a truly foundational issue: the normative basis for punishment in international criminal law. This issue has engaged my thinking as well, and Woods is to be congratulated for moving the ball forward and asking the...

...and of compliance as complementarity’s principal mission. Ten years later, the picture that has emerged is far from what I – and perhaps many ICC supporters – had thought. But this is a necessary reckoning: it is an invitation to think differently about what the ICC can do, what we can fairly ask of it, and its role in an international and political landscape that remains in enormous flux. I am delighted that the contributions to this symposium are an opportunity for continued reflection on these critical and complicated issues....

In case anyone is interested in the latest efforts to combat the financing of terrorism, I wanted to let you know that I will be moderating a panel tomorrow on this topic. The symposium (sponsored by the New York International Law Review, the International Law and Practice Section of the New York State Bar Association and St. John’s University Law School) will be at St. John’s Manhattan Campus, 101 Murray Street. Two hours of CLE credits are available with a CLE registration fee of $50. For additional info, contact Nancy...

This week, we’re hosting a symposium on The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How Health, Family and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries, a new book by Katerina Linos (Berkeley Law). Here is the publisher’s description: Why do law reforms spread around the world in waves? Leading theories argue that international networks of technocratic elites develop orthodox solutions that they singlehandedly transplant across countries. But, in modern democracies, elites alone cannot press for legislative reforms without winning the support of politicians, voters, and interest groups. As Katerina Linos shows in The...

...for yet another reason: it is perhaps the clearest judicial pronouncement on the impact of lockdowns – now a common phenomenon globally – on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR). States’ COVID-19 responses, as has been detailed by the International Commission of Jurists in its report Living Like People Who Die Slowly: The Need for Right to Health Compliant COVID-19 Responses, have commonly had serious impacts on the full range of ESCR. Despite this, writing in this same symposium, Justice Moses Chinhengo notes that during the COVID-19 pandemic Courts have...

[Jean d’Aspremont is Associate Professor of International Law, Amsterdam Centre for International Law (ACIL), University of Amsterdam and Editor-in-chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law] This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-3 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Debate has always been a central medium of thought-making and, hence, knowledge-production in social sciences. This is why, albeit aware of the pitfalls of such platforms (see my EJIL:Talk! post), I initiated, with the help of Dov...