Weekend Roundup: April 6-12, 2013

This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a symposium on the latest issues of the Leiden Journal of International Law, introduced here by Dov Jacobs. The first article, On the Functions of International Courts: An Appraisal in Light of Their Burgeoning Public Authority by Armin von Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke, discussed the functions of international courts in the international legal order beyond their traditional dispute settlement role. In his comments, Andreas Føllesdal asked how a “function” is defined and whether the various functions of international courts contribute to our assessment of their effectiveness and legitimacy. Ruti Teitel suggested to open up the question of legitimacy. The authors’ response can be found here.

The second article in the symposium was by Darryl Robinson, entitled A Cosmopolitan Liberal Account of International Criminal Law. Jens Ohlin commented how the article had made him take a step back. Mark Drumbl raised points on moral agency and how ICL can understate responsibility in mass atrocity. Darryl’s response is here.

Another series of guest posts was by Jonathan Horowitz and Naz Modirzadeh who provided two posts (1, 2) discussing how international law could work in transnational non-international armed conflicts.

If writing a guest post for Opinio Juris is on your wish list, check out the call for papers for our upcoming New Voices symposium, aimed at international law students and early career professionals.

In our regular posts, Julian shared his impressions about the ASIL Panel on China and international law, discussing in particular the importance of sovereignty to China as a fundamental principle of international law. Julian also pointed out Judge Leval’s article in Foreign Affairs defending the ATS and agreed with his suggestions of how a modern legislator could limit civil jurisdiction for the enforcement of universal norms.

Kristen brought a request for an advisory opinion to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea to our attention and wondered about the background of this request.

Deborah considered the McClatchy report that most drone strikes do not target senior al-Qaeda leaders, and speculated about what could the domestic and international legal basis for these strikes could be.

Chris posted about a conference this week at St John’s on the topic of Cyberconflicts. For more on upcoming conferences, see our events and announcements post.

Finally, as always, we provided you with our weekday news wraps.

Many thanks to our guest contributors and have a nice weekend!