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17 Sep

[Christopher K. Connolly is an Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New York. This post is written solely in the author’s personal capacity. The views expressed in this post are the author’s alone and cannot be attributed in any way to his employer or any branch of the U.S. Government.] On September 7th, faced with new polls showing a surge in support for Scottish independence, the British government made a pledge to the people of Scotland: vote “No” in this Thursday’s referendum, thereby remaining within the United...
17.09.14 | |

06 Mar

We have invited several academic luminaries to post here at Opinio Juris over the next few days about the crisis in Ukraine, with particular emphasis on Russian intervention in Crimea. As we have done in the past with other symposiums, we also welcome young academics to submit guests posts for possible publication. We can’t guarantee we will publish every post submitted, but we would love to broaden the discussion to include new voices. So if you want to write a guest post for Opinio Juris about Ukraine of approximately 500...
06.03.14 | |

17 Sep

...the independence decision is a decision which the people of Scotland have a democratic right to make, and that it is a decision to be made by them alone. It also politically binds the Governments to respect the result of the referendum. In short, it represents an acceptance, in this instance, by the United Kingdom of the right of the Scottish people to secessionary self-determination. Irrespective of the outcome of the vote, the Scotland precedent puts pressure on other governments to grant similar referendums to secessionist movements in their own...
17.09.14 | |

17 Sep

...the decolonization context. Second, the right to self-determination in most instances authorizes a people to exercise its right to internal self-determination, which is typically reflected in a right to form a regional government and/or have other cultural, linguistic, and religious rights respected by the mother state. The right to self-determination, outside of the decolonization context, may lead to the secessionist type of external self-determination only in extreme instances where the mother state chooses to completely disrespect the people’s right to internal self-determination. According to the Canadian Supreme Court in the...
17.09.14 | |

16 Sep

[Jure Vidmar is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Law and Research Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. Some arguments made in this post are further elaborated on in this article.] The Treaty on European Union (TEU) now gives member states an explicit right to exit the EU and provides for a mechanism that makes this right effective. However, the TEU does not directly regulate the future relationship between the EU and a territory which is seceding from a member state. If Scotland votes for...
16.09.14 | |

16 Sep

[Stephen Tierney is a Professor of Constitutional Theory, University of Edinburgh and Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law.] In the Edinburgh Agreement of 2012 the United Kingdom Government committed itself to respect the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum. This suggests that, in the event of a Yes vote, the transition to independence will be relatively straightforward, as will the pathway to Scotland’s international recognition and membership of the United Nations – see here. How then would Scotland’s move to statehood be characterised under international law?...
16.09.14 | |

15 Sep

[David Scheffer is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law and Director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law.] If the Scottish people vote in the majority on September 18th to become an independent nation, then a host of legal issues will descend immediately upon Holyrood, where the Scottish Parliament sits in Edinburgh, and Westminster, the legislative center of the United Kingdom Government in London. Some of these issues can be overcome if there is a willingness to negotiate in good...
15.09.14 | |

10 Sep

We have invited several academic luminaries to post here at Opinio Juris beginning early next week about the Scottish independence referendum that will be held next Thursday, September 18th. As we have done in the past with other symposiums, we also welcome other academics to submit guests posts for possible publication. We particularly welcome Scottish, British, EU and state succession experts. We will focus on the international legal aspects of the Scottish referendum, not the political or economic implications of the vote. We can’t guarantee we will publish every post...
10.09.14 | |

02 Jun

[We are grateful to continue our discussion on Samantar with a comment from Prof. William Dodge of the UC Hastings College of Law. Please keep following us for more thoughts in future posts and click “Related Posts” to see earlier contributions on this question.] Like my colleague Chimene Keitner, I wrote an amicus brief supporting respondents (co-authored with Mike Ramsey), and I too am happy with the result in Samantar. Although Curt Bradley’s post magnanimously notes that his position lost 9-0 in Samantar, it would be wrong to...
02.06.10 | |

07 Mar

...act of a regional power that simply lacks the array of international legal actors, tools and institutions to pressure its most critical neighbor in more internationally acceptable ways. In fact, Russia’s attempts to internationalize its neighborhood revisionism have found few overseas backers, as Syrian President Assad’s current lone supportive voice underscores. In the wake of the 2008 Georgia War Moscow’s vigorous diplomatic efforts to secure international recognitions for Abkhazia and South Ossetia yielded few successes- just Nicaragua, Venezuela and three small Pacific island states, one of which embarrassingly revoked. By...
07.03.14 | |

10 May

...the relevant conduct-regulating rule comes from international law and thus already applied when and where the activity underlying the claim arose. The Court thus had to apply the presumption to what everyone agrees is a jurisdictional statute, and that application does indeed contradict the Court’s explicit refusal to apply the presumption to a jurisdictional statute in Morrison. I’ve decided to include most of these points in a symposium essay here if you are interested: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2246138 Stephanie Mandell Response...YOu may want to follow US v Ross Mandell and Adam Harrington out...
10.05.13 | |

02 Jun

...my view, it is entirely appropriate that the Court read the FSIA as it was written, and left it to the district court to address Samantar’s claim of common law immunity in the first instance. In arguing for immunity, Samantar seemed to take for granted that, if the FSIA applied to individuals, he would enjoy immunity for torture and extrajudicial killing. He argued that, both under the common law and the FSIA, “individual immunity … was coextensive with the law of state immunity and always immunized a foreign official for...
02.06.10 | |