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. Thank you very much to the Virginia Journal of International Law and Opinio Juris for hosting this online discussion on my recent VJIL Article, “Moral Judgments & International Crimes: The Disutility of Desert.” The international criminal regime exhibits many retributive features, but scholars and practitioners rarely defend the...

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...

[Kevin Jon Heller is currently Associate Professor & Reader at Melbourne Law School.] This post is part of the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics Vol. 45, No. 1 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I appreciate the opportunity to respond to Jenia’s excellent article. I always learn from her scholarship, and this article is no exception. That said, I find myself in an unusual quandary. When asked to critique an article, I normally take issue with its substance. There is...

[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...

...Special Court for Sierra Leone (Cambridge, 2020). I wish to take this opportunity to heartily thank these A-list of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners, who took time out of their busy schedules to read and comment on my work.  The reviews, as posted during this online symposium over the past couple of weeks, moved from the (more) general to the (more) specific. Authors in the first group commented broadly on the book, and in several instances, also highlighted key issues of particular relevance (Prosecutor Stephen J. Rapp here and here, Mr....

[Jonathan Baron is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.] 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. Thank you to the Virginia Journal of International Law for inviting me to participate and to Opinio Juris for hosting this discussion. I found this Article to be interesting and informative. It all makes sense to me, and I have no major criticisms. I would like to mention a...

[Jennifer Keene-McCann is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Asia Justice Coalition and is based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Aakash Chandran is a Fellow at the Asia Justice Coalition and is based in New Delhi, India.] This third Opinio Juris symposium relating to crimes against the Rohingya marks another difficult anniversary. Its theme, ‘Myanmar and International Indifference: Rethinking Accountability’, evokes a call to keep approaches to international justice fresh, creative, and most importantly relevant to the needs of survivors. This includes continually searching and testing new avenues for justice. Over the...

This week, we are pleased to host a symposium on The Electronic Silk Road (Yale University Press) by Anupam Chander (UC Davis). The publisher’s description is: On the ancient Silk Road, treasure-laden caravans made their arduous way through deserts and mountain passes, establishing trade between Asia and the civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean. Today’s electronic Silk Roads ferry information across continents, enabling individuals and corporations anywhere to provide or receive services without obtaining a visa. But the legal infrastructure for such trade is yet rudimentary and uncertain. If an...

...entire project. And now these themes indeed suffuse this symposium in that they resonate through the words of all four commentators Our book bobs and weaves between academic writing and journalistic exposition. Academic hangovers compel us to define and delimit. Halfway through the project, once the empirical research in the archives was complete, and our file-stories drafted, we hit a point of inflection. Should we just stop there? Should we simply publish the file-stories, with modest historical background to situate the reader in Communist Czechoslovakia, and leave the rest unspoken?...

[Melanie O’Brien is Senior Lecturer in International Law at the University of Western Australia, and Second Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.] As part of the Opinio Juris symposium, “The impact and implications of International law: Myanmar and the Rohingya”, this post looks at the potential impact and implications of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC) cases on the crime of genocide. Is there anything specific about the Rohingya cases in these two courts that may in some way develop the definition of...

[ Francesco Messineo is a Lecturer in Law, Kent Law School, Canterbury (UK).] 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. Unless international lawyers get their act together and agree on the basic meaning of the key terms in their discipline, says Jean d’Aspremont, observers (and, crucially, funders) may suddenly realize that the profession is really no more than an ‘expensive debating club’ – often funded by the taxpayer – ‘in...

...ground’. For them, what Max Weber famously called an ‘ethics of responsibility’ – concerned with the consequences of political actions – was a crucial element of the real politics of transitional justice. Teitel’s work – and particularly the book to which this symposium is dedicated – belongs, I would argue, to this (sometimes forgotten) intellectual tradition. While firmly committed to ideals of justice and legality, Ruti’s work is characterised by a sense of political realism that unambiguously recognises and critically engages with the role of politics in constraining, enabling and...