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Search: crossing lines

30 Oct

...Mathias Thaler in his recent book, No Other Planet (2022), calls these flaws “fault-lines”. For Thaler, these fault-lines are an essential part of the utopian method. They force the reader to reflect, and probe the utopian project they are being presented with. Such faults and cracks are a common feature of critical utopias as they prompt interrogation of what is meant by utopia, highlight the contingency of the present in the fictional narrative, and open up future potentialities. Utopianism, then, is not just about some utopian destination or place, it...
30.10.23 | and |

23 Dec

...and critique of international law and lawyers cannot remain blind to the inherent limitations of each scheme taken in isolation from the general critical corpus. For example, such concepts as Third World, Global South, gender, race, etc., are all arrows of a greater critical quiver that seeks to uncover the trajectories of subjugation, domination, oppression, and exclusion that the prevailing narratives of international law and international lawyers have promoted, defended, facilitated, and consolidated from the discipline’s founding until our days. Without losing sight of the nuances of each exegesis, we...
23.12.22 | |

14 Dec

[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...
14.12.22 | |

03 Apr

...extensive lines of code involved, rendering it challenging for enforcement agencies to assess. Unlike conventional technologies where physical characteristics can be examined, AI systems often consist of intricate algorithms with millions of lines of code, making it daunting to verify their functionalities, especially when those functionalities could have both benign and harmful applications.  In addition to the monitoring and verification challenges, AI is increasingly provided as a service rather than a standalone product, complicating export controls and oversight of its use across multiple countries. With the rise of cloud computing...
03.04.24 | and |

15 Feb

...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...
15.02.22 | |

14 Dec

...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...
14.12.25 | |

02 Mar

...to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control” leaves room for flexible and open interpretations of these “red lines”. . While Anthropic were clearer and firmer in their stance, OpenAI seem to be taking a more strategic stance; publicly posturing themselves as upholding safety, legal and ethical “red lines” while ensuring there is opportunity to exploit the military “gray zones” the DoD claim they cannot avoid. The fact that OpenAI suggests it was able to secure the guardrails that Anthropic was...
02.03.26 | , , , and |

03 Oct

...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...
03.10.18 | |

11 Apr

...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...
11.04.12 | |

21 May

[Dr Rick Lines is Executive Director of Harm Reduction International, and a Visiting Fellow at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex. Damon Barrett is the Director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Law, Stockholm University. Patrick Gallahue is the Communications Director at the ACLU-Connecticut, and former Coordinator of the Death Penalty Project at Harm Reduction International . He is a doctoral candidate in the Human Rights Centre , University...
21.05.15 | |

04 Jun

...prohibited use of force in cyberspace under the jus ad bellum or where the lines are for an attack under the jus in bello. The Tallinn Manual is the paradigmatic example of this (often quite good) work. More recently, States and scholars have moved on to cyber operations below these lines, with attention shifting in Tallinn and elsewhere to which cyber operations may generate counter-measures and defining when cyber operations violate the duty of non-intervention. Such efforts have (so far) had relatively little to say on the question of a...
04.06.15 | |

29 Apr

For a while there, it looked as if there might be a real fight over Harold Koh’s nomination as State Department Legal Adviser. The Republicans have been casting about for a nomination that they could defeat on some issue of principle (that is, over something not involving a nominee’s tax returns), along the lines of Lani Guinier’s failed nomination to the Clinton Justice Department. It might also be useful for them to pick up a rallying call. Anti-internationalism has looked pretty promising. As fringe elements started taking shots at Koh,...
29.04.09 | |