I am occasionally accused -- correctly, of course -- of using the blog as little more than a tool for shameless self-promotion. So it gives me great pleasure to use the blog as a tool of shameless other-promotion and announce the publication of Jens's important new book, The Assault on International Law, now available from our friends at Oxford University Press....
The Washington Post has a long article today about how Mossad and the CIA collaborated to blow up Hezbollah's chief of international operations in 2008. Here are the key paragraphs: On Feb. 12, 2008, Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, walked on a quiet nighttime street in Damascus after dinner at a nearby restaurant. Not far away, a team of CIA spotters in the...
Just Security has published two long guest posts (here and here) on the ICC and Palestine by Nimrod Karin, a J.S.D. candidate at New York University School of Law who was previously Deputy Legal Adviser to Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations. There is much to respect about the posts, which are careful, substantive, and avoid needless hyperbole. And I agree...
Not surprisingly given where I perch on the political spectrum, I love protest songs. One of my favourite jogging playlists is a disparate collection of classics -- Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction," Country Joe and the Fish's "I Feel Like I'm Fixin to Die Rag," Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Indian Reservation," Phil Och's...
So this is a well-intentioned but problematic idea: The Palestinians want the International Criminal Court (ICC) to launch an investigation into the death of Yasser Arafat, a senior Fatah official announced on Sunday. Jamal Muheissen, member of the Fatah Central Committee, claimed that Israel was responsible for the death of Arafat, who died in November 2004. “This file will be presented to the...
According to this report in the Times of Israel, the Palestinian Authority would be willing to forego the ICC if Israel agreed to freeze its settlement activity: RAMALLAH — A senior Palestinian official said Sunday that the first subject to be brought before the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Palestinian Authority’s legal campaign against Israel would be settlement construction. The...
Sorry, Lonely Planet, there's a new travel sheriff in town: Fox News. Witness this map, created by a guest on Fox & Friends to illustrate the eight "no-go" zones -- areas under de facto Muslim control -- in Paris (out of 741 in France itself): Peterson, a former Air Force pilot, went on to describe Paris as “pretty scary” and compared it to Afghanistan, Iraq,...
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo certainly thinks so: Which brings us back to Roger Ver, variously known as a "Bitcoin entrepreneur" or the "Bitcoin Jesus." Ver is now a citizen of Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. He was so excited about avoiding taxes that as soon as he became a Nevisian he set up yet another start up that...
I published my first post on Opinio Juris on February 10, 2006. That was almost nine years ago, and although I do not have exact figures, I estimate that I've written around 1,800 posts and close to a million words on the blog since. And my lifetime numbers are actually even a bit higher -- beginning in August 2004, I blogged for a while...
I have posted a long new essay on SSRN, my contribution to a fantastic collection of essays that OJ's own Jens Ohlin is editing for Cambridge University Press, The Theoretical Boundaries of Armed Conflict & Human Rights. The essay is entitled "The Use and Abuse of Analogy in IHL," and here is the abstract: It is a truism to say that...
H-Diplo, part of H-Net, recently hosted a virtual roundtable on David Bosco's excellent book Rough Justice:The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics, published by Oxford last year. Erik Vroeten introduced the roundtable, and Sam Moyn, David Kaye, and I submitted reviews. David then wrote a response. Here is a snippet from Erik's introduction: It is my pleasure to...
Courtesy of Chris Moody, here is an actual letter written by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to a little girl in Michigan: Santa Claus has always seemed a bit communist to me. More of the Vietnamese or Chinese nationalist variety, I guess. Happy holidays, everyone!...
