Search: crossing lines
01 Nov Conversation on WAR
...peace-keeping commander saying there was too much confusion about what it meant to move from peace-keeping to war fighting. He calls it ‘crossing the Mogadishu line’ and claimed that crossing that line was to the detriment of the peacekeepers and the people of Somalia. So talking about war or war fighting can be a signifier: moving from engaging in the use of force for a certain limited end i.e. to deliver food in Somalia or protect civilians, to something where your limited mission is seemingly put aside and you put...12 May Guest Post: Strong Words, Weak Arguments – A Response to the Open Letter to the UN on Humanitarian Access to Syria (Part 1)
...IHL. International Humanitarian Law The letter frames its claims on the following argument: “International humanitarian law is unequivocal that where a civilian population is in need of life-saving aid, impartial humanitarian action ‘shall be undertaken’. In order to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, international law requires impartial humanitarian actors to seek the consent of the parties concerned. In February 2014, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2139 demanding that all parties, in particular the Syrian authorities, allow rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access across conflict lines...23 Sep Book Symposium: Cyber War – A Duty to Hack and the Boundaries of Analogical Reasoning
...(including the potential for it to incentivize greater military cyber surveillance to solidify the reliability of various cyber capabilities). In doing this analysis, however, I was struck by the larger challenges of using analogies to carve out the existing lines of IHL in cyberspace (not to mention the contours of any new lines that I propose). As a result, I ended up framing my chapter around a larger, introductory analysis of the role of boundaries in legal discourse over cyberspace. Readers may be familiar with debates over whether cyberspace is...
15 Feb Spirituality and Duress: Local Culture Beliefs at the International Criminal Court
...rendition of figure 3. It illustrates the extent to which meaning produced in testimony can be altered through ignoring its wider interactional context: Once the Judge obtains the answer that later reappears as part of ‘the pattern’ (lines 12-14), he returns the floor to the defence counsel. The latter in turn invites the witness to recontextualize his previous answers, by asking two targeted questions about the time frame of his belief (lines 17-18 and 20-21). In the answer (only partially reproduced here), the witness responds with a biographical account that...
06 Mar Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere: The Epistemic Turn in Doctoral Education
...public quality to practical knowledge as we use it to progress defined social purposes: information transmission, problem-solving, career progression, innovation, and future-building figure high in our priorities. It also possesses a private character as we employ it to improve professional practice and industrial activities in service of individual and corporate interests. Despite the purported division between universities and the real world, researchers produce knowledge destined for assembly lines and boardrooms as well. Most influential of all the forms is knowledge as identity. The knowledge we internalise is intimate, comparable to...
14 Dec The Unconscious Lightness of Play: On Research and International Law
[David Matyas is a PhD Candidate and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law whose research focuses on the laws of humanitarian assistance. Before turning to law, he worked as an aid worker focusing on disaster risk, with placements in Niger and Senegal.] Each year, as the holidays roll around in winter and summer, I’m reminded of a few lines by US Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis D. Brandeis to a young lawyer at his firm. He writes, “The bow must be strung and...10 Oct How to Get Quirin Right When Quirin Was Wrong
...on are all military offenses that have no analogous "crime" in either domestic or international law. There is no actual charge of spying. The offense in Quirin was "passing through lines of defense without uniform". This has nothing to do with spying, or the civilian crime of espionage. It also has a special rule, because if the enemy solider passes back through your lines and rejoins his army then the offense is cancelled out and he can never be charged with it. There is no comparable "home free" rule that...
03 Oct Trump vs. International Law: Reflections on the “Scorecard,” Transnational Legal Process and the Paris Agreement
...give one example, the normative idea of transnational legal process would suggest that the travel ban should have been litigated as an international human rights issue. In practice, however, the litigation had to be rooted in the Establishment Clause and administrative law arguments to prevail in the lower courts (and even these arguments, dismayingly, did not win a majority of the Supreme Court). Professor Koh gives a good description of this litigation, but he does not address the tension between his transnational legal process frame and the lines on which...
02 May Soldier Self-Defense Symposium: The View from the Ground – Emerging State Practice on Individual and Unit Self-Defense
...that questions about self-defense are even being raised at this point is because practice has far outpaced the law. Thus, to complement the other contributors’ outlines of state positions, I am going to focus on the state of practice surrounding self-defense. For this I will rely on a series of studies I conducted examining how individual and unit self-defense have been used by different NATO countries in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in other undeclared conflict zones. In addition to background legal research, I interviewed some 78 military lawyers, commanders, and other...06 Nov Bodansky: Update from Barcelona Climate Change Negotiations
...mechanisms (possibly including new rules for the CDM and for land-use change), and capacity-building. Given the current state of the negotiations (which remain bogged down), an outcome along these lines remains a very ambitious objective for Copenhagen, even if it is reflected “only” in COP decisions rather than in a new legal agreement. How much does the legal status of the Copenhagen outcome matter? For years, academics have been debating the merits of “soft” vs. “hard” law. Now, this issue has moved front and center in the climate negotiations. Coming...