The Wall Street Journal had a news story yesterday, "Spain is Moving to Rein in Crusading Judges" (May 20, 2009), reporting on moves in the Spanish parliament to place stricter limits on the ability of investigating magistrates - most famously, Baltasar Garzon - to undertake sweeping investigations and indictments worldwide on the basis of universal jurisdiction: Under pressure from irate foreign...
Jack Goldsmith has a new essay out in The New Republic, "The Cheney Fallacy," comparing the basic elements of the Obama and Bush national security and counterterrorism policies. It walks through eleven core features of the national security-counterterrorism apparatus, from Guantanamo to targeted killing to interrogation, etc., and compares the two administrations. Certainly I think this is the right basic...
I'm not sure I entirely agree with Kevin's last post re the Wall Street Journal, but I'm going to let that go in favor of taking up another issue that comes from an earlier WSJ editorial, Pelosi's Self-Torture. (WSJ, editorial, May 15, 2009.) In the middle of that editorial (with which I otherwise largely agree), the Journal notes that Pelosi...
Texas Tech professor and retired Army colonel Richard D. Rosen has a very fine new article up on Westlaw on targeting and civilian immunity. It is a superb article - I myself am broadly in agreement with its sensible views on civilian immunity, human shields, sheltering among civilians, etc. - but even those who might disagree will find an outstandingly...
In the course of discussion with journalists at the Brookings Institution meeting I mentioned below, one interesting side question arose. In the course of the debates over Bush administration lawyers, and now Pelosi and the CIA, Republicans have publicly (and perhaps increasing numbers of Democrats privately, as the Pelosi debate gains strength) argued that Democrats should be careful what they...
I spent the past two days at an excellent conference organized by Ben Wittes - we discussed his book Law and the Long War (which I see you can get for the bargain price of $6.99 on Amazon) here at OJ when it came out - on ways in which Congress should legislate the future of US counterterrorism. It was...
William Ranney Levi's paper on interrogation techniques, Interrogation's Law, is forthcoming in Yale Law Journal, but is up at SSRN. Here is the abstract: Conventional wisdom states that recent U.S. authorization of coercive interrogation techniques, and the legal decisions that sanctioned them, constitute a dramatic break with the past. This is false. U.S. interrogation policy well prior to 9/11 has allowed...
University of Iowa law professor Mark Osiel - an old friend of mine and someone well known to many of us, particularly for his books and writing on mass atrocities - has a new book out, The End of Reciprocity: Terror, Torture, and the Law of War (Cambridge 2009). I've read it at pretty high speed - looking for some...
Congratulations to Ed Swaine and Sean Murphy for yesterday's Potomac Roundtable on foreign relations law at GW. It was a terrific meeting, with excellent papers from Kristina Daugirdas, Louis Fisher, and Ed Swaine - topics ranging from FSIA to war powers to Youngstown. I learned a lot - Duncan was also in attendance from Philly - and it was great...
I imagine many readers have by now seen this story in the New York Times (and Julian beats me to it!) reporting that the Obama administration appears ready to return to military commissions for trying at least some Guantamo detainees: Officials who work on the Guantánamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying...
For a fascinating google-map of individual cases identified swine-flu occurrences, see here. (Can't vouch for its accuracy, however, and as H/T Futurepundit points out, it will rapidly get overwhelmed as more cases become identified over time.) Among the interviews I participated in as one of the experts on the Gingrich-Mitchell UN reform commission back in 2005 was one with a senior...
Eric Posner picks up on Marko Milanovic's very interesting comments in response to my question below about the views of non American international lawyers of the ATS. I'm going to pull up interesting responses to my question into this separate post - currently from Marko, Francisco Forrest Martin, and I'll update if others add things to the bottom of the...
