Several months back, Opinio Juris put out a call for papers for our inaugural on-line symposium to junior scholars. The theme was described as follows: As long as people have been writing about public international law, commentators have suggested that it is a system in crisis or somehow under stress. After a moment of optimism at the end of the Cold...
As March draws to a close, I thought it would be helpful to recap some of the great blogging that has been going on at OJ. Some of these represent new directions for the blog, and it would be great to hear from our readership what you like and what you would like to see more of in the future. We...
I encourage readers in the Boston area to attend a terrific event taking place tomorrow at the John F. Kennedy Library: The Elizabeth Neuffer Forum on Human Rights and Journalism, sponsored by the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF). The program tomorrow focuses on women in Islam and reporting. Here are the details: Date: Thursday, March 29 Time: 10:30am – 1:00pm Location: Smith...
As we gear up for our ASIL guest bloggers and the Annual Meeting, it is worth pointing out the important work ASIL does in support of international law scholarship and teaching. Among other things, ASIL is responsible for several essential publications, including the American Journal of International Law, the premier peer-reviewed international law journal in the U.S., and the...
Opinio Juris is pleased to bring (almost live) blogging from the UN Human Rights Council session that opens today in Geneva. Our guest blogger is Elizabeth Kandravy Cassidy of UN Watch. Elizabeth is an American-trained lawyer whose prior experience includes teaching law in Africa and the United States. Prior to joining UN Watch, Elizabeth did a bit of...
Marking the beginning of the spring human rights season, the US State Department yesterday released its annual human rights report. Since 2003, it has become increasingly difficult for the U.S. to use this report as the effective "shaming" tool it once was. Secretary Rice's comments upon release of the report refleted this sober reality: We do not issue these...
Opinio Juris is pleased to welcome Professor David Sloss as a guest blogger for the next week. Professor Sloss will be familiar to many of our regular readers as a prior contributor and commentator. He teaches a range of international and domestic law subjects at Saint Louis University Law School, and his recent scholarship has focused on foreign relations...
In this excellent article in Foreign Policy, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon argue that human psychology explains the tendency for hawks to win out over doves on decisions to go to war. As decisions makers weigh arguments for and against the use of force, psychological biases — rather than politics or strategy — may pre-dispose them toward hawkishness: Social and...
David Ignatius notes in today's WaPo America's worsening reputation among our "friends" in the Middle East: Let's start with some poll numbers presented at the Doha conference by Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and a fellow of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, which co-sponsored the conference with the Qatari foreign ministry. The polling was done last year...
Today is the anniversary of a shameful event in US history: the 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of German-, Italian- and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Two House Representatives from California, Xavier Becerra and Dan Lundgren are today introducing a bill in Congress to bring attention and some small amount of justice to the...
The role of reputation in international law and international relations is incredibly hard to quantify. Among assertive unilateralists in the US, it is often argued that dents to American reputation that result, for example, from deviations from well-established international human rights standards, are outweighed by the need for other states to deal with the U.S. Internationalists, on the other hand,...
Like Roger, I have been intrigued (and somewhat disturbed) by the effect of television on student perceptions of torture. One of my students recently responded to an argument that torture is ineffective with a reference to "24," a program in which, apparently, torture is routinely applied with effective results. I have never seen the program myself, but found Jane...
