I want to congratulate my friend -- and friend of Opinio Juris -- Dapo Akande on his promotion to Professor of Public International Law at Oxford University. It's a massive accomplishment, and one richly deserved. Here is a snippet of Dapo's impressive bio: Dapo Akande is also Yamani Fellow at St. Peter's College and Co-Director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics,...
The event at George Mason University on the ICC and Palestine is today. Here, again, is the flyer: If you cannot attend, the live-stream link is here....
I will be participating next week in what should be an excellent event at George Mason University on the ICC and Palestine. The other participants are all excellent -- David Luban, Meg DeGuzman, George Bisharat, and the organizer, Noura Erakat. Here is the flyer: I hope at least some Opinio Juris readers will be able to attend and hear my dire prognostications in person. (If you do,...
A few years ago, John Brennan articulated the US position concerning self-defence against non-state actors: Because we are engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qa’ida, the United States takes the legal position that —in accordance with international law—we have the authority to take action against al-Qa’ida and its associated forces without doing a separate self-defense analysis each time. As the quote makes...
I will be back blogging regularly soon, but I want to call readers' attention to a phenomenal new article at the Intercept by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain about how the US government has cynically manipulated public fears of terrorism in order to justify its bombing campaign in Syria. Recall that Samantha Power -- the UN Ambassador formerly known as...
There's been much discussion in the blogosphere about the University of Illinois' decision to "un-hire" (read: fire) a Palestinian-American scholar who resigned a tenured position at Virginia Tech to join its faculty, a decision motivated by a series of anti-Zionist (but not anti-Semitic) tweets that made the University's wealthy donors uncomfortable. But the rightful revulsion at Illinois' decision (more than 5,000...
Mike Lewis has a guest post at Just Security today responding to Ryan Goodman's recent post exploring what the US's claimed "unwilling or unable" test for self-defence against non-state actors means in the context of Syria and ISIS. Ryan, careful scholar as always, rightly points out that the test "remains controversial under international law." Mike doesn't seem to have any such...
Matrix Chambers has extended the deadline for applying to September 26 -- two weeks from today. I hope readers with the appropriate credential will consider applying. You can find the original post, with details of the Matrix vacancy, here....
Bobby Chesney has responded at Lawfare to my most recent post on the CIA and the public-authority justification. It's an excellent response from an exceedingly smart scholar. I still disagree, but Bobby's post really hones in on the differences between us. I'll leave it to readers to decide who has the better of the argument. I do, however, want to discuss...
In the first part of my response to Bobby, I argued (after meandering around a bit) that Title 50's "fifth function" provision cannot be used to authorise the CIA to kill Americans overseas -- a necessary condition of any argument that the CIA is entitled to a public-authority justification with regard to 18 USC 1119, the foreign-murder statute. (Bobby kindly responds here.) I...
My friend Bobby Chesney has responded at Lawfare to my previous post arguing that Title 50 does not provide the CIA with a public-authority justification to kill Americans overseas. He disagrees with both of the limits on presidential authority to authorise covert action I discussed. I will address the Article II question in a separate post; in this post I want...
As I noted in my previous post, my co-blogger Deborah Pearlstein has suggested that a covert operation authorised by the President under Title 50 of the US Code could function as the CIA's equivalent to the AUMF in terms of its authority to kill an American citizen overseas. Here is what she has argued: Here, even if the AUMF was not meant to...
