In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Kenneth Anderson

17 Oct

For the last several years, I have been watching with fascination and admiration as my friend and Washington College of Law colleague, Daniel Bradlow, has been developing more or less from scratch an innovative tool in development finance for his native South Africa, what he has titled "Reconciliation and Development Bonds."  Professor Bradlow heads the international legal studies program at...

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17 Oct

I apologize for arriving late to the party; I have only just had a chance to read Professor Ring's fascinating article completely through.  There are many reasons why I would come to this article already predisposed to like it - I started out life as an international tax lawyer, for example, and I am also an unapologetic defender within the...

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09 Oct

The current issue of the New Yorker, week of October 13, 2008, special election issue, has a nice article,“Worlds Apart,” by Nicholas Lemann on the foreign policy differences between Obama and McCain - including a good discussion of each candidate’s foreign policy advisory team.  The article is worth reading for Lemann's interviews with each candidate's leading senior foreign policy people.  He describes...

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27 Sep

Some of my students have asked if there is some book that provides an entry level discussion of monetary issues and currency.  One quite good recent book is Craig Karmin, Biography of the Dollar.  Karmin is a Wall Street Journal reporter, and his book offers very good financial journalism (February 2008).  It covers the history of the dollar and its...

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23 Sep

Yesterday, on Monday, September 22, the 63rd UN General Assembly meetings got underway.  As an annual confab, it features a parade of speeches by heads of state and foreign ministers and the Secretary General.  This year had a couple of special items.  One was President Bush's farewell address at the UN.  A second-US-centric event was the arrival of Governor Sarah...

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22 Sep

(Update, Saturday, September 27, 2008.  As a reminder that credit markets and banks are globally interlinked, note that even as WaMu fell in the United States and was taken over by the FDIC, in Europe the Dutch-Belgium Fortis Group (banking and insurance) was under major pressure and might well fall by early next week.  Major pressure means that market investors...

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21 Sep

Eric Posner, over at VC, remarks on the continuing attention to Carl Schmitt, and indeed the increasing attention to him within the American jurisprudential community: Why do people like me and Sandy Levinson keep talking about the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt? Schmitt was skeptical that a parliamentary democracy can handle crises: it can only role over and let the executive act....

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20 Sep

Paul Kennedy’s book on the history and future of the United Nations, Parliament of Man, appeared in 2006. A Spanish translation appeared in late 2007, which I review in a (very) long essay (some 10,000 words, be warned) appearing in Spanish in the Revista de Libros (Madrid), November 2008 issue. The Revista, for which I serve as political science advising editor is one of the best...

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