30 Oct Reflections on International Law Weekend
I want to post a public thanks to all who contributed to the great success of International Law Weekend which wrapped up on Saturday. My co-chairs Hari Osofsky, Nancy Thevenin and Patrick Reed, as well as the President of the American Branch of ILA, Charles Siegal, (who really was the fifth co-chair) deserve kudos, along with our terrific Organizing Committee. Lots of other individuals and groups helped make the event run as smoothly as it did, but none more so than Jill Schmeider Hereau and Amity Boye from ILSA. Special thanks go to the Permanent Mission of Pakistan to the United Nations which hosted the gala reception on Friday.
From the parochial perspective of Opinio Juris, I was happy to see the impressive showing of the OJ co-bloggers — and many of our guest blogging alums — at the conference. (We missed you Kevin!) On behalf of all the OJ bloggers, let me extend our thanks to Sarah Ultsch and Ninell Silberberg of Oxford University Press for sponsoring and co-hosting our Opinio Juris wine reception at the Algonquin. It made all of us at OJ look good to be in such great company and we are most appreciative of OUP’s generosity.
One of the many things that I enjoy about being an international law professor is the chance to exchange ideas with smart, engaged colleagues from around the world. ILW provided such an occasion, and I learned a lot from the panels and discussions. I’ll have a couple of follow up posts to some of the panel discussions, but in the meantime, please feel free to post any comments or feedback.
I thought the conference was well-organized–I was only able to attend on Saturday, but I enjoyed each of the panels I saw. I was especially impressed by the panel on inter-state complicity in the context of human rights. Disturbing stuff. The speakers there focused on legal liability of accessory states, but as far as the underlying crimes go, it seems clear that high-ranking members of the Bush administration are likely to face difficulties traveling in much of the world and will face lawsuits or efforts to extradite much as Kissinger and Pinochet did. Just a note on the panel on consular assistance and diplomatic protection. It was, to me a clear case of “one of these things is not like the other.” There was a historian (Scully), a legal scholar (Vermeer), and a fellow at a conservative think tank (Mac Donald). Now, I understand that the academy leans left, and the bar probably does as well, so efforts at ideological balance are on the whole a good thing. And, reading between the lines, Vermeer is probably pretty liberal–Scully possibly, although it was harder to tell. I practice immigration law, so this was a topic of particular interest to me. So… Read more »