I don't often write about animal-rights issues here at Opinio Juris, because I'm sure many readers view the systematic murder of tens of billions of animals each year for food as less important than the many atrocities involving humans that take place all over the world. I don't agree with that perspective, but I certainly understand it. So I save...
Please think about submitting an abstract for a conference on the legacy of the much loved, much missed, and much lamented Robert Cryer. The conference announcement is below: Robert Cryer: A Life in Law and a Law unto Himself We greatly miss Professor Rob Cryer, who passed away in 2021 at the age of forty-six. We aim to channel this loss, those...
A little-known aspect of the war in Ukraine is that both Russia and Ukraine have deployed weapons that are capable of being used fully autonomously: for Russia, Lancet drones; for Ukraine, Punisher drones. Both weapons are capable of being operated semi-autonomously, and it is not clear whether Russia or Ukraine has used them in their fully autonomous mode. But the...
In an excellent recent blog post at Just Security, Tom Dannenbaum identified four options for prosecuting Russia's unprovoked aggression against Ukraine: [T]he International Criminal Court, an ad hoc international tribunal (whether along the lines proposed at Chatham House or pursuant to a General Assembly resolution), a domestic court exercising territorial jurisdiction (in Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine), or a domestic court exercising...
Nearly 40 legal and political luminaries, including many people for whom I have the utmost respect -- such as Dapo Akande, my Doughty Street colleague Helena Kennedy QC, and Ben Ferencz -- have signed a Combined Statement and Declaration calling on the international community to create a Special Tribunal for the Punishment of the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine. The...
Every scholar, from the most junior to the most senior, has a horror story about the languorous pace of academic publishing. The journal that took six months to reject their article. The journal that took six months to ask them to revise and resubmit their article and then took another six months to reject the revisions. The journal that accepted...
When Telford Taylor was planning the trial programme for the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMTs), he was faced with a dilemma concerning the Nazis' pre-war mistreatment -- legal and physical -- of Jews and members of other despised groups. Unlike the London Charter, Control Council Law No. 10, the NMTs' enabling statute, did not require crimes against humanity to be committed...
The blogosphere and twitterverse are replete with horror stories about how universities treat their academic staff. And rightly so: for most academics, particularly those who are part of the ever-growing ranks of the adjunct professoriat, the rise of the neoliberal university has meant -- as summarised by a recent book on the subject -- little more than "de-professionalisation, worsening conditions...
We at Opinio Juris take great pride in the fact that we have never, at any point in our 17-year history, asked readers to give us money. Fortunately, despite rarely having been flush with cash, we have never needed to. None of the permanent members of the blog have ever taken a penny for their blogging (which means I've been...
In my previous posts on the crime of ecocide -- Post 1, Post 2 -- I argued the theoretical/normative case against the IEP's decision to subject lawful acts to anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis via the "wantonness" requirement. In this post, I want to bracket the issue of whether the definition of ecocide should distinguish between lawful and unlawful acts and question...
In my previous post, I criticised the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide (IEP) for endorsing a definition that is unjustifiably anthropocentric. In particular, I criticised the idea that "knowingly" causing a substantial likelihood of either widespread or long-term severe environmental damage is not criminal unless it is "wanton," defined as "reckless disregard for damage which would...
I have been eagerly awaiting the results of the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide (IEP), which includes a number of excellent lawyers and some close friends. The exercise has always been largely symbolic: even if 2/3 of states parties are willing to support an ecocide amendment, which is unlikely, an amendment to Art. 5 of the...