Search: self-defense

...of historical meaning is an all-or-nothing proposition, as Professor Spiro seems to imply. Although I’m not necessarily advocating the approach, I could imagine someone saying that historical meaning can be a starting point or a presumption, subject to overriding functional or practice-based modifications. Thus one could see a role for the book’s project in modern debates, without denying the relevance of other considerations. Professor Ku raises some interesting and somewhat related thoughts on self-executing treaties. I tend to agree with his policy preference for non-self-executing treaties, mostly for the reasons...

...opportunities. Beyond the direct impact of being blacklisted on Canary Mission, there is every possibility that critical teaching on Palestine scuppers the development of ties between an academic’s institution and the prospective Israeli partners. Of course being labelled a troublemaker has implications for job security as well. Avoiding self-censorship and practical next steps Beyond the personal costs noted above, most damaging of all is the self-censorship or self-policing the threat of recording provokes. Academics and students who would otherwise feel empowered to proffer critical opinions may feel less inclined to...

...of self-defence of NATO members. This is confirmed by Article 7 NAT, which declares that the Treaty does not affect the rights and obligations of NATO members under the UN Charter, which includes their right of self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter. Accordingly, nothing in the NAT prevents Denmark and other NATO members from exercising the right of individual and collective self-defence against the US, whether they do so on an ad hoc basis or pursuant to Article 42(7) TEU. Moreover, NATO members have committed themselves in Article 1...

prevent its rules from being broken, it can—precisely at the moment of violation—assert its continued relevance through persistent structures and institutional responses. This includes instances where legal language is not rejected but strategically appropriated through co-option— for example, when the vocabulary of self-defence, proportionality, or self-determination is deployed to justify uses of force that plainly exceed legal thresholds.  In such contexts, discursive maintenance does not resolve the underlying violation, but works to expose the dissonance by reaffirming legal baselines, challenging justificatory framings, and resisting the dilution of legal standards through...

...the rule by deciding, at the time of treaty negotiation or ratification, that a particular treaty provision is “non-self-executing” (NSE). In sum, the de facto Bricker Amendment converted the treaty supremacy rule from a mandatory to an optional rule by creating an exception for NSE treaties. The lawyers who invented the NSE exception to the treaty supremacy rule in the early 1950s claimed that they were merely following nineteenth century precedent. That claim was patently false. Before World War II, self-execution doctrine and treaty supremacy doctrine were independent, non-overlapping doctrines....

...for these insurmountable workloads was to switch to a part-time contract. So, although I have worked above and beyond contractual hours for years now, I would be rewarded with a 20% or 40% pay cut, just to cope in academia? Then how would I cope financing a household on my own? On the flip side, when successes come, the feeling of external affirmation is such a salve for low self-esteem. Fragile self-worth seeking these moments is a recipe for disaster, because complex personal circumstances simply do not allow me to...

...does not have to be about writing fixed end-state ideal societies or resolutions to harm.  Koskenniemi’s binary structure for international legal discourse that is stuck between wishful thinking and apologies, as well as Allott’s blueprint Eutopia, negate any potential for self-reflection as method. Reading these critical utopias, and studying their “fault-lines”, requires us to ask different questions about international law’s relationship with utopia. For example, we can ask whose utopia is it, and we can ask what harms and inequalities are being maintained by being caught in a self-imposed feedback...

...order to argue in a fairly straightforward manner that the almost complete physical and cultural destruction of Native Americans was an act of self-defence and self-preservation. We are particularly astounded because this has been a standard trope to justify imperial violence, domination, and expansionism for centuries. From the 1857 Indian Rebellion to ‘Jewish financial terrorism’ the white racist imaginary is structured around supposed existential threats to which it is responding ‘defensively’. Nowadays, arguments about ‘white genocide’, ‘anti-white racism’ and the ‘white pride and self-preservation’ are at the centre of the...

...area of treaty law is messy for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say that there is substantial disagreement in the courts, and even more disagreement in the legal academy, as to how and whether to give a treaty self-executing effect. What the Supreme Court might (but probably won’t) do is clarify this very murky and fuzzy area of the law. Or, as is more likely, they may confuse matters even further. *For a defense of Scalia not recusing himself in Hamdan, see here....

...all treaties.) And the Supreme Court’s decision that the U.N. Charter is not self-executing, coming 63 years after its ratification, has sent State Department lawyers scrambling to determine how many other treaties might also not be self-executing. 3. Part III of the article — “How International Law Comes Home” — is an especially valuable and well-documented compendium of the different ways treaties are applied in U.S. courts. 4. Part IV of the article includes several practical suggestions for ensuring enforcement of treaties in U.S. courts. I agree that a Clear...

...agreed to allow the PLO, their political representatives, to establish institutions to exercise self-governing powers in the West Bank and Gaza. This was pursuant to the Declaration of Principles (DoP), in which Israel and the PLO agreed that the aim of the negotiations was to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, “for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338”. It was also agreed that the...

[ Giulia Pinzauti  is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Leiden Law School’s Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies. Alessadro Pizzuti (Twitter: @Aless_Pizzuti) is the co-founder and co-director of  UpRights .] The authors would like to thank Miles Jackson and Daniel Gryshchenko for their help and suggestions for this post. Introduction Framing Russia’s unlawful use of force against Ukraine as an other inhumane act, via the violation of the right to self-determination, is not without implications and raises potential problems that need to be further explored. In this second...