Search: crossing lines
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...
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...
14 Dec Drug Boats, Drone Strikes and the Dangers of Avoiding Mirrors
...rules-based, accountable warfare. It is an early example of the very erosion of norms that many civil society groups, legal scholars, and human rights experts warned would follow from an overly elastic interpretation of both domestic and international law. The lesson here is not that the Obama and Trump administrations are identical. Let me be clear: they are not. But it is essential to acknowledge that once legal lines are blurred, future administrations, especially those less committed to being governed by the rule of law, will simply drive straight through...25 Feb Drones as Strategic Airpower and the Light Cavalry?
...with sophisticated surveillance gear but also missiles, act as the lightest of light cavalry. They probe, surveil, and engage in pinprick attacks, behind enemy lines, far beyond one’s own lines. When the CIA engages in targeted killing against some Al Qaeda operative in Somalia, from a strategic perspective, it is a combat raiding strategy by very light cavalry indeed. But it is so far beyond one’s own lines, as it were, that from a legal standpoint, I would place it beyond the legal “armed conflict” altogether and treat this combat...11 Apr VJIL Symposium: Robert Howse Comments on “Interpretation and Institutional Choice at the WTO”
...the legitimacy of the judiciary, since “bright lines” can often appear to favor systematically one value or one constituency over another in an area of normative contestation (the authors discuss the now clearly rejected (Shrimp/Turtle) “bright line” that the unadopted Tuna/Dolphin panels invented on PPMs, which systematically excluded a whole range of activist environmental strategies from consistency with WTO law): here we should consider Cass Sunstein’s thinking about “one case at a time.” Where the AB has strayed from this strategy and tried to draw brighter lines, it has usually...