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Search: crossing lines

18 Apr

...foundational principle of the international legal order. The authors skillfully point to the substantive values which are involved in the rule of law when adapting its content to the field of international peace and security: compliance, transparency, and accountability of international decision-making. These values, which constitute the qualities required for a normative order to be stable, certain and predictable, are therefore essential to the consolidation of the international community. Both formally and substantially, the rule of law encompasses authoritative guidelines to limit the discretion of the authorities who are called...
18.04.23 | |

14 Apr

...order to drain the ink supply in company fax machines, inundating computers with e-mails causing them to crash, and tying up company phone lines to prevent legitimate calls. We can only pray that al-Qaida hasn’t obtained a copy of the Assessment. Should it ever decide to take a page from the eco-terrorists’ playbook — repurposing the cellphones it now knows we’re monitoring to prank call the Pentagon, for example — the damage to our national security could be incalculable. Keep up the good work, DHS! A weary nation thanks you...
14.04.06 | |

29 Jun

...implement a compulsory license is shared. This is the underlying principle of the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in Relation to Access to Medicines (2008), as affirmed by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Paul Hunt, who drafted these guidelines (see here, p.12). This principle is enshrined under Articles 7 and 8 of the TRIPS Agreement, which recognise the need for states to take appropriate measures against practices that constitute an abuse of intellectual property rights or adversely affect technology transfer. States have various policy tools...
29.06.23 | |

14 Jul

...of my proposed “Unified Liability Theory” does just that. While preserving incitement’s pride of place in reference to genocide, it would untether it from this traditional mooring and link it to the other core crimes. Just to be clear, in relation to Roger’s concern, that necessarily means adding incitement to crimes against humanity (CAH). And, more granularly, it should also entail incitement to the individual enumerated CAH acts. Thus, we should be thinking along the lines of incitement to CAH-extermination, for example. And this is not such a radical idea....
14.07.17 | |

15 Nov

...draw upon what, to my then-amazement, was offered by human rights groups a couple of years ago in multiple conferences as the ‘good’ way to approach this (that is, an alternative to military tribunals): pass a bunch of statutes with very vague terms along the lines of “material support” that could be used to get convictions in federal court. My estimation at the time was that the idea then was simply a strategy for persuading people to drop military tribunals and get them into federal court – whereupon, undertaking the...
15.11.08 | |

12 Jan

...outside of the zone of active combat in Afghanistan. Challenging questions arise from the use of both justifications at the same time, without careful distinction delimiting the boundaries between when one applies and when the other applies. This article will focus on the consequences of the United States consistently blurring the lines between the armed conflict paradigm and the self-defense paradigm as justifications for the use of force against designated individuals. In particular, there are four primary categories in which the use of both paradigms without differentiation blurs critical legal...
12.01.12 | |

14 Jan

Notwithstanding its recent efforts to avoid recess appointments with 12 second sessions, the Senate will return in full next Monday. For international lawyers, the big question is whether UNCLOS finally gets a vote for the Senate’s advice and consent. As I noted here and here, the SFRC voted UNCLOS out of Committee last fall largely along party lines. But it’s been all quiet since. Indeed, I’ve heard from a couple of sources that the window for Senate A&C to accession is closing, if not closed. What I don’t know is...
14.01.08 | |

09 Mar

...part of Notre Dame’s award-winning business school class entitled, Business on the Front Lines. The class has around thirty business, law, and peace studies students who focus for a semester on four specific case studies of social entrepreneurship. After weeks of study, the students travel during spring break to the countries and do field analysis. I’m here with six students, and there are three other teams right now in Nicaragua, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. You can read about their exploits here. We work with Catholic Relief Services, which is one...
09.03.13 | |

21 Jul

The chance for major immigration reform during this session of Congress has apparently passed, according to this Reuters item here and an editorial in yesterday’s Times. Although I teach and write in immigration law, I have found this year’s high-profile debate on the subject pretty unedifying. This is in part because it has been mostly about politics rather than law. The politics may be unpredictable, with positions that cut deeply across party lines, but they are also enveloped in unreality – the unreality of controlling immigration. As Tamar Jacoby (a...
21.07.06 | |

05 Jan

[Tomer Broude is a Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law and Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the following post continues our conversation on Shaffer and Pollack’s When Cooperation Fails] Mark Pollack and Greg Shaffer well deserve the praise that the previous commentators have given them for their study of the transatlantic law and politics of GMOs, “When Cooperation Fails”. Empirically, the book is a model of qualitative research, in some parts following the lines of Greg’s superb Defending Interests. The theoretical dimensions of the book masterfully...
05.01.10 | |

29 Mar

...forms of noncompliance that may be beneficial, but I do not consider them at length. Professor Pauwelyn first claims that I go “too far by underestimating the flexibilities and exit options that exist within the system of international law.” What I describe as noncompliance, he sees as “flexibilities and exit options perfectly permitted and accepted within international law.” I wish more people thought along those lines, and I wish it were that international law were more like what Professor Pauwelyn describes. Unfortunately, international law and international legal scholars appear to...
29.03.07 | |

07 Nov

...to attack non-state actors in cases of unwillingness or inability of the host State, but rather requested each State to deal with the threats they encountered inside their own borders. In fact, this understanding of a limited set of options available to deal with rebel forces acting across national lines is precisely the legal discussion at the heart of the Mexican and American positions during the 1916 Punitive Expedition, and exactly the reason why I find its inclusion on Deeks’ chart so surprising. But more on this in Part II....
07.11.18 | |