Following up on my previous post, and as Peggy pointed out, one of the themes in America Between the Wars is the struggle to “define the era” since the fall of the Berlin Wall and to provide a grand strategy, much in the same way as George Kennan’s “X” article had provided the intellectual underpinnings for the policy of containment...
Before turning to some of the broader themes that Chollet and Goldgeier have set out, in this post I want to focus our readers on two quotes from one person. The authors describe how, in the days after the 1991 Gulf War, an interested party was asked about why we did not drive all the way to Baghdad and oust...
Antoine Buyse at the ECHR Blog has posted an analysis of Gafgen v. Germany, a decision handed down by the ECHR on Monday concerning the admissibility of evidence resulting from statements made under the threat of torture. Here's the background:In 2003, the applicant, Magnus Gäfgen, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of J., the eleven year old son,...
The NY Times Week in Review has an article written by Graham Bowley on the effect of recent attacks by Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) on Nigeria’s oil infrastructure and the effects of these attacks on world oil prices. The piece begins:When armed rebels from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta attacked...
A recent op-ed published in the New York Times suggested that the states of the United States should do just that. Thomas W. Evans, who had been an adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, argued that OPEC's actions violate U.S. antitrust law and artificially raises the prise of gasoline. However, he noted that the act of...
We at Opinio Juris want to thank once again Haider Hamoudi for guest-blogging with us this past week. For more on the issues he has raised, be sure to visit his blog, Islamic Law in Our Times and read his memoir, Howling in Mesopotamia. We hope he will soon join us again for another guest-blogging stint. ...
I have been particularly interested in Haider Hamoudi's observations in his book on cultural differences within Iraq. In two contratsing examples, Haider describes his visit to Basra in Southern Iraq and Suleymania in the North. Basra is predominantly Shi’a and Suleymania is in Kudish territory. A couple of vignettes were striking. First, there was a guard in Basra asking Haider to...
Foreign Affairs Magazine Online has just posted a review essay by Curtis Bradley of Benjamin Wittes' new book, Law and the Long War. Bradley writes:In an important new book, Law and the Long War, Benjamin Wittes, a fellow and the research director in public law at the Brookings Institution, critiques what he calls the "legal architecture" of the war on...
We are pleased to welcome guest blogger Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Professor Hamoudi is a prolific scholar on Islamic and comparative law and also has a blog, Islamic Law in Our Times. Professor Hamoudi has also recently published Howling in Mesopotamia: an Iraqi-American Memoir, described on Amazon.com as… a groundbreaking insider's story...
Dr. Antoine Buyse of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), Utrecht University, has started a new blog on the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Posts are on topics as diverse as the use of separate opinions by the European Court of Human Rights, a review of a case on whether envrionment-friendly wind turbines are a nuisance (thus...
The British newspaper The Guardian is currently having Hay Festival, major book festival. With all these writers and public figures around, there are some fun possibilities. As the folks at The Guradian put it: Hay is full of the cleverest and sharpest minds, but if they could ask one person just a single question, who would they choose - and...
We all know the adage that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. In a recent op-ed, Mark Shulman of Pace Law School shows how if only the Bush Administration had remembered history, they may have repeated it. Shulman, who besides being a lawyer also has a doctorate in history and a particular expertise in military history,...
