Search: crossing lines
04 Feb A Response to Tom Ginsburg, Michael Vandenbergh, Mark Cohen, and Jonathan Wiener
...as well. We agree that the US and other countries have internal divisions that complicate their attempts to deal with climate change. We argue, however, that the differences in China are of a far greater magnitude than the blue state/red State divisions in the US and have more serious consequences for climate change. Eastern China is 5 times richer than Western China and the most serious fault lines that produce social instability—rich and poor, industrialized and agrarian, urbanized and rural—fit the East/West divide. Moreover, in the US, blue states turn...19 Jul Trail Smelter Redux (a.k.a. “Superfund Returns”)
...last year in Spector v. Norwegian Cruise Lines, in deciding to avoid the presumption against extraterritoriality issue by focusing on a statute’s regulation of conduct within the United States while downplaying any attendant extraterritorial impacts. In Spector, the Supreme Court held that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) generally applied to foreign-flag cruise ships in U.S. waters notwithstanding complaints that such an application would control cruise-ship operations and facilities outside of U.S. territory and conflict with foreign laws. Similarly, here, CERCLA may be applied only within U.S. territory in the...08 Mar Texas’ Last Stand on Medellin
...But even after this admission, this report suggests Texas has changed its position and will contest the authority of the President to order it to comply with the ICJ order. According to its spokesman, [Texas] respectfully believe[s] the executive determination exceeds the constitutional bounds for federal authority. The State of Texas believes no international court supersedes the laws of Texas or the laws of the United States. This statement (thanks to Carlos Vazquez for the heads up) suggests two lines of resistance (further suggested by Lederman’s pointer): (1) that the...21 Jul A Few Thoughts on Immigration Reform (R.I.P.)
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...02 Oct Kiobel Roundtable: The Alien Tort Statute, Kiobel, and Extraterritoriality
...pose to U.S. foreign relations), while leaving open other potential applications of the ATS, such as to U.S. citizens and corporations (for which the United States may have some responsibility) and to foreign citizens residing in the United States (on the ground that the United States has an interest in not being a haven to human rights abusers). Although it is hazardous to make any predictions from oral argument, a number of the Justices during the reargument in Kiobel appeared to be searching for an intermediate approach along these lines....09 Nov The Oxford Guide to Treaties Symposium: Starting a Conversation on Interpretation
...in special subject areas such as human rights or international trade, how to deal with time factors, whether particular considerations arise if international organisations are involved, whether there is a useful potential crossover from the originalist/constructionist debate in constitutional interpretation, and whether an evolutionary method of interpretation forms a distinct approach. The Guide takes up some of these issues but much of its consideration of the topic is set in the context of the VCLT provisions. Perhaps now is a good opportunity to take stock of new lines of investigation....09 Mar How Microfinance Transformed a Filipino Mountain Village
...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...21 Sep Events and Announcements: September 21, 2014
...far along the paper is. Because of the nature of the workshop, we can only include working drafts that have not yet been accepted for publication. We also workshop early stage projects. If you are interested in presenting on an early stage project, please let us know the working title and a few lines about the idea you are pursuing. Finally, if you are interested in being a discussant, please let us know. We will do our best to get back to everyone in November, and, for those whose working...14 May Translating Citizenship Outside the State
...liberal democracy is possible beyond the state as constituted by citizens. I think I come out somewhere in between. I agree with Alex that citizenship most readily translates to other forms of territorial governance. Citizenship in the European Union, for example, doesn’t pose a major theoretical challenge. It doesn’t look all that different from citizenship in federal states such as the US. But anything else is much trickier. I’m hardly proposing the end of history here. But conflict and group definition will increasingly be drawn along non-territorial lines. How does...31 Jul The al-Marwalah Detention
...Ben’s paradigmatic case for noncriminal detention illustrates the dangers. He points us to one GTMO detainee, Bashir Nasir al-Marwalah (p.158), and tells us that this is what the evidence shows: al-Marwalah attended a training camp in Afghanistan in 2000, at which he had rifle training on how to be a sniper. His stated goal was to learn to fight in Chechnya. He was caught while retreating, “with” the Taliban, from “the back lines” of the fight with the Northern Alliance. Ben does not suggest that he had been fighting the...