Search: crossing lines
16 Feb UK Okpabi et al v Shell: UK Supreme Court Reaffirms Parent Companies May Owe a Duty of Care Towards Communities Impacted by their Subsidiaries in Third Countries
...Okpabi, and more than 42,000 individuals from the communities of Ogale and Bille in the Niger Delta, alleging that oil spills from the respondents’ pipelines caused severe environmental damage, affecting their land, livelihoods, water sources and health. They sued Royal Dutch Shell plc (Shell), UK-based parent company, and its Nigerian subsidiary SPDC, which operates the joint venture between Shell and the state-owned oil company. But the responsibility of Shell, and the jurisdiction of UK courts over the case, was contested by their legal counsel. Both the High Court and the...
03 Feb The Appeals Chamber Invents Conditional Post-Acquittal Release
...integrity of its process.” The drafters have already made that value judgment, concluding that the integrity of post-acquittal release requires the acquitted person to be released unconditionally unless exceptional circumstances justify keeping him in detention. That is a perfectly sound position: although an accused person has rights throughout the criminal process, those rights are at their absolute highest following acquittal. At that point in the process, it makes complete sense to structure release along the binary lines contemplated by Art. 81(3)(c). It is problematic enough that the AC decided to...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...
09 Aug Doing Justice to History Symposium: Doing Justice Through History
...the MRTA armed groups as an armed conflict under international humanitarian law, and 2) it decided to study the history of the conflict in the context of Peru’s history of structural inequality. Thus, the TRC concluded that the Peruvian armed conflict had had a two-tiered explanation: the most immediate cause, it said, was the decision of the Shining Path (and only the Shining Path) to launch an assault on Peruvian democracy. At the more structural level, however, the Shining Path sought to “exploit old historical fault lines, that are transversal...
08 May The Race Ceiling and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Resolution: What the UNGA Vote Reveals About International Law’s Epistemic Community
...genuine political solidarity across racial lines and should be recognized as such. The resolution’s passage reflects a real coalition, one that includes states whose scholars have built the TWAIL tradition– a tradition whose critique of international law’s colonial foundations is indispensable and whose contributions to exposing the racial architecture of sovereignty, recognition, and development remain foundational. To engage critically with TWAIL’s epistemic framework is not to contest its project. It is to ask whether that project has fully reckoned with the exclusions it risks reproducing within its own epistemic community....05 Feb AJIL Symposium: Is the Vienna Convention Hostile to Drafting History? A Response to Julian Davis Mortenson, Part 2
...as internally inconsistent. This contention, however, builds on a misunderstanding of the role of the international legal scholar. Treaty interpretation is an activity that engages many different kinds of agents, including, for example, international legal scholars, judiciaries, state organs and representatives, and state counsels. Not all agents are subject to the same societal constraints, of course. Depending on the capacity of a treaty interpreter, consequently, different lines of action are typically expected. So, for example, is a person acting as state counsel expected to choose the line of action that...
03 Nov Third Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Subverting Otherness Against Oppression – Decolonizing International Legal Scholarship Through the Music of Bob Marley and the TWAILers
...educational and religious systems of Western civilization, the ideological pillars of the imperialist colonial order: Building church and university Deceiving the people continually This part calls for epistemological independence, in terms similar to the famous lines from ‘Redemption song’: Emancipate yourself from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds ‘Ambush in the Night’ continues the argument against the status quo of colonial and imperialist domination. The song shows Marley’s skepticism and distrust not only of his friends, but of Babylon’s operations in general (political theories, ideologies, educational or...09 Mar Jenni Millbank Reflects on Panel 3 and Responds to Guglielmo Verdirame
...can be definitively drawn between integral and marginal conduct associated with sexuality. Sexual orientation is expressed—and revealed—in hundreds, if not thousands, of subtle and obvious ways through appearance, speech, behavior, dress and mannerisms. Moreover, lines between what is “integral” and what is “marginal” conduct associated with sexual minorities in another culture prospectively drawn by Western decision makers have often failed to properly encompass accepted human rights standards, as the lower level decisions in HJ and HT amply demonstrate. Over a decade of my own research on sexuality-based refugee status determination...
30 Mar International Cyber Law Strategy for the UN Global Mechanism
...available for international law matters, choosing how to spend scarce negotiating capital becomes especially critical. This post outlines four ways states could structure their engagement with international law within the Global Mechanism. From Applicability to Practice The predecessors of the Global Mechanism, the UN Groups of Governmental Experts (operating between 2012–2021) and the Open-Ended Working Groups (2019–2025), approached international law largely at an abstract level. Their deliberations focused on whether existing law applies in the cyber context and whether new law is required to govern this domain. While meaningful progress...