The frozen conflict over the Georgian separatist region South Ossetia has become a shooting war. On the first day of the Olympics, no less. According to CNN: "All day today, they've been bombing Georgia from numerous warplanes and specifically targeting (the) civilian population, and we have scores of wounded and dead among (the) civilian population all around the country," President Mikhail...
Durham University's International Boundaries Research Unit has made a map that illustrates the various disputes over the Arctic. The BBC reports: "Its primary purpose is to inform discussions and debates because, frankly, there has been a lot of rubbish about who can claim (sovereignty) over what," explained Martin Pratt, director of the university's International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU). "To be honest, most...
Greg Fox of Wayne State University Law School has posted a new article on SSRN that examines the proposed US/Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) from a unique angle. Discussions in U.S. academic journals and blogs have tended to focus on the constitutionality under U.S. law of the Administration pursuing the completion of a long-term security arrangement with Iraq under...
On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris, I want to thank Benjamin Wittes for joining us this week for a symposium his book Law and the Long War. We also want to thank Bobby Chesney, Geoff Corn, Marty Lederman, Glenn Sulmasy, and Steve Vladeck for their guest-blogging with us. Their contributions were invaluable. We also want to thank everyone else from the Opinio Juris...
In a similar vein as Peter and Peggy before me, I want to mine two of Ben's premises: that we are in a new kind of war and that this needs a new kind of law. I do agree in part with Ben on each of these-- I think we are facing conflict of a different sort than we have before and I also think...
We are pleased to host this week a discussion of Benjamin Wittes’ book Law and the Long War. Ben's book is a comprehensive analysis of how September 11th did--and did not--change National Security Law, the disparate group of legal mechanisms related to counter-terrorism. It is also about what the role of law in counter-terrorism should be. It is a book that is sure...
I just wanted to remind everyone that next week we will host a discussion of Benjamin Wittes' book Law And the Long War. Besides Ben, Bobby Chesney (Wake Forest), Geoff Corn (South Texas), Glenn Sulmasy (U.S. Coast Guard Academy), Steve Vladeck (American University), Marty Lederman (Georgetown) and possibly one or two others will be joining us for the book symposium. ...
We are very happy to announce that, as of Monday, Deborah Pearlstein of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs will be joining Opinio Juris as our newest (OK, only by two weeks) member. A scholar and practitioner in national security law, Deborah served from 2003 to 2007 as the founding director of the Law and Security Program at Human Rights...
When international lawyers say that sovereignty is a social construction, I doubt any of us mean it as literally as does the Seasteading Institute, an organization founded by Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman, and Wayne Gramlich. Their goal is to foster a seasteading movement, people building structures on the high seas that would become independent and...
Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, has up two posts on sovereignty and geography. Quoting from Neal Ascherson, one post begins: There "may or may not have been," he writes, "something called the 'Akwizgran Discrepancy'." It's now just "a forgotten thread of diplomatic folklore." (Ascherson, by the way, is the author of Black Sea, an excellent history of the region.) The discrepancy may have been a small...
Besides announcing our new partnership with Oxford University Press, and debuting our new-and-improved website, we are also pleased to welcome Kenneth Anderson of American University’s Washington College of Law as the newest member on the Opinio Juris team of bloggers. Ken should be well-known to our readers. He is a scholar in areas such as international humanitarian law, international finance, and...
This deeply unsettling experiment starts on a typical Monday morning on Manhattan's leafy Upper West Side, where commuters stroll by Starbucks and Central Park. At 7:10 a.m., I'm off to see how long it takes to buy a child slave.So begins a report by ABC's Nightline. By 5:00 pm the journalist is in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and he has made a...
