Search: crossing lines
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...
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...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...
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 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...
03 Apr Symposium on Military AI and the Law of Armed Conflict: Navigating the Governance of Dual-Use Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Times of Geopolitical Rivalries
...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 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...