We are happy to announce that this Monday Professor Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School will join Opinio Juris as our newest member. Kristen’s articles range across a variety of topics in international law and, in particular, she has become a respected scholar regarding questions of the responsibility of international organizations and of states. She also writes...
Yesterday, Harold Koh, the Legal Adviser of the U.S. State Department, spoke at the U.S. Cyber Command Inter-Agency Legal Conference on the applicability of international law to cyberspace and, particularly, cyberwar/ cyberconflict. For a couple of takes on the speech, see the Washington Post here and Defense News, here. In our ongoing efforts to make full-text presentations of international...
NYU's Journal of International Law and Politics (JILP) has recently announced that it "is transforming from a purely student edited journal into a peer reviewed journal in which all leading articles will henceforth be selected with the assistance of leading academics in the field." See the announcement here. Why the change? The announcement explains: Authors publishing in the new JILP will benefit from...
My colleague Mark Movsesian has a post at the St. John's Center for Law and Religion Forum concerning the case of Ramil Safarov. He begins: At a NATO conference in Hungary in 2004, an Azeri officer, Ramil Safarov, murdered one of the other participants, an Armenian officer named Gurgen Margaryan. Actually, that doesn’t quite capture it. Safarov broke into Margaryan’s room,...
Courtesy of Christopher Libertino, my favorite film composer (and former college roommate), I want to point out that a recent post by James Daily on Subculture for the Cultured is about the international law ramifications of the actions of the superhero Daredevil in his current story arc. Daily is an attorney and a research associate at the Hoover Institution's Project on Commercializing Innovation....
This is the third day in our discussion of Professor Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Links to the related posts can be found below. Following-up on my earlier post on the difficulty of changing contracting practices by executive agencies, I thought I’d highlight a few quotes from a January 2011...
This is the third day in our discussion of Professor Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Links to the related posts can be found below. On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris, I’d like to thank Laura (and our guest bloggers) for joining us this week to do a...
Following on Ken’s most recent post on autonomous battlefield robots, I came across the short story Malak by Peter Watts (you can read it here). What jumped out at me was a short story that beginning with epigrams such as these: “An ethically-infallible machine ought not to be the goal. Our goal should be to design a machine that performs better...
Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations has an interesting peek at the history of the formation of the World Bank and IMF in a New York Times op-ed. From their inceptions, the World Bank has traditionally had an American President and the IMF a European Managing Director. But why? I had learned in college that...
We thank Legal Adviser Harold Koh for guest posting the statement on Syria that he delivered earlier today at the American Society of International Law Annual Meeting. As this posting is a release of a speech text and Legal Adviser Koh will not be online to respond to comments, we at OJ didn't place a comment thread under the released text. However, we open the following comment thread to...
The ABA Journal has a cover story about the threat posed to island states by climate change. This is a topic we have discussed on Opinio Juris at various times. Duncan wrote at length about the Maldives; I had a shorter piece here, and there are various references in the midst of other blog posts. The Journal article is long and...
Here's something you don't see every day: Oxford University is seeking applicants for the Chichele Professorship of Public International Law. Oxford's announcement begins as follows: The Oxford Faculty of Law is a major centre for the study of international law. We aim to build Oxford’s role in the field, as international law becomes increasingly important and complex, and more closely involved with...
