Search: crossing lines
04 Jun Guest Post: Stepping Back from the Precipice in Bond
...of the nation’s population). In his opinion, however, Justice Thomas suggests that the judiciary should begin to draw such lines and should, in particular, recognize that “treaties by their nature relate to intercourse with other nations (including their people and property), rather than to purely domestic affairs.” Justice Thomas acknowledges that “the distinction between matters of international intercourse and matters of purely domestic regulation may not be obvious in all cases.” Even so, he concludes that “hypothetical difficulties in line-drawing are no reason to ignore a constitutional limit on federal...01 Jan Divesting Federal Foreign Affairs Power? The Sudan Accountability & Divestment Act
It’s a happy new year (of sorts) for U.S. Human Rights Groups concerned about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur. For the last several years, groups such as the Save Darfur Coalition have pushed state and local governments to divest from companies that invest or do business with Sudan. Their efforts have produced some impressive results –since 2005, 22 U.S. states have divested their assets from Sudan, either along the lines recommended by the grassroots Sudan Divestment Task Force, or through some other model (the movement also has a private...
21 Jun The Inadequacy of the US State Department Report on Arms Exports Assurances: Part I
...making a prediction of risk from the assurances misses multiple critical lines of inquiry. It concentrates on just a few superficial criteria, and overlooks several key points and the overall context. Certainly, the State Department may have taken these factors into consideration in its internal, confidential evaluations and not mentioned them in its report to Congress, but the report lacks clarity and transparency in this regard. The fact that the State Department chose to only ask four brief, vaguely-phrased, and backwards-looking questions before making predictions on the likelihood of misuse...
08 Aug Emerging Voices: The Time We Have, the Space We Need
...by way of obliterating the element of time that a reboot of international scholarship was made possible, creating new avenues for academic debate and rerailing intellectual conversations along lines that we somewhat keep following today. But even when the abstract functioning of disciplinary discourse is exposed, its structural bias remains unexplained. For precisely because it is indeterminate and theoretically empowers no-one, international law is also invariably used to disempower the already disempowered. Here, almost on a second thought, the contextuality of time reappears, echo of a broader post-structural turn which...20 Sep Events and Announcements: September 20, 2015
...Review. For detailed guidelines about the award, including a link to our rules and regulations please visit the website here or contact us at: hracademy@wcl.american.edu. Calls for Papers/Abstracts: The Junior International Law Scholars Association (JILSA) is holding its annual meeting on Friday, January 22, 2016, at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. JILSA is an informal network of junior scholars at mostly American law schools who get together annually for a self-funded workshop. Junior faculty and fellows interested in presenting at the meeting should email proposals to MJ Durkee...28 Jun YJIL Symposium: The Seal Products Dispute and the Boundaries of Trade Law
[Simon Lester is the President of WorldTradeLaw.net and a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute.] This post is part of the Yale Journal of International Law Volume 37, Issue 2 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Over the past two decades, there has been an effort by many trade law academics and others to define the boundaries of international trade rules in a way that disciplines trade restrictions, while allowing sufficient policy space for governments to regulate in legitimate ways. Rob...
28 Jan International Law’s Invisible Frames Symposium: Concluding Remarks
...in which the reconstruction of the past event is made. Thus, while adjudicators and investigators examine evidence regarding past events, their examination involves lenses that are affected by current circumstances (like current emotions or contemporary norms of attention). Furthermore, cognitive processes employed by judges or military investigators are vulnerable to well-known biases (such as confirmation bias, which is highlighted in Krebs’s chapter). Buis rightly underlines the role of emotions in IHL. Indeed, recent social cognitive studies underline the role of motivation and emotions (labelled as ‘affect’) in a broad range...31 Oct Global FEMA?
...costs away from those who cause them. Compensate folks for building houses on floodplains or sand dunes and they’ll just build them again. These problems would presumably be compounded at the international level. So maybe the endpoint is more in the way of today’s state-federal partnerships than in the way of world-government FEMA. FEMA itself is starting to do some thinking vaguely along these lines; here is a news item from earlier this week about an EU-IOM-Namibia agreement that institutionalizes disaster relief in advance. Other such arrangements will surely follow....04 Sep Executive Discretion and Congressional Indecision
...counterterrorism policy — that is, a war on terror — is as important as the White House believes it is, then it merits the blessing of the legislature and ought not to exist merely at the discretionary whim of some future president. On the eve of midterm elections that could reverse Republican control of at least one house of Congress, (see here, here and here) one would think that this would be a particularly propitious time for the Bush Administration to work with Congress along the lines Anderson is suggesting....14 Jun Steinberg and Zasloff on Power and International Law
...in the last century. While views of the relationship between power and international law are diverse, and many approaches straddle heuristic lines, they can be grouped into four intellectual movements: classical legal thought; realism (of which there are three variants); law matters (sociological, rationalist-institutionalist, and liberal views); and constructivism. Each major intellectual movement may be seen as a reaction to the ideas that preceded it, and each may be better understood in the context of international developments contemporaneous with their emergence. In recent years, each major movement has evolved to...