The Supreme Court hears arguments in the Arizona SB 1070 case on Wednesday. I'll have some things to say on the merits over the next couple of days, but first a lament: why did the Court feel like it had to take the case in the first place? It could have waited. There are a bunch of cases making their way...
The answers to my questions last week were no further away than the latest copy of the AJIL and an important article by Emilie Hafner-Burton, David Victor, and Yonatan Lupu on Political Science Research and International Law: The State of the Field. This is a must-read for anyone interested in IR/IL, past and future. As for the "war on paradigms", it has...
The European Court of Human Rights is getting a lot of play today with its decision to okay the extradition of Abu Hamza to the US. To much less (read: no) fanfare, it also denied a petition to compel external voting rights in Greek parliamentary elections for Greek citizens living outside of Greece in the case of Sitaropoulos and Giakoumopoulos...
Daniel Nexon has a gem of a short review of books by Samuel Barkin and Charles Glaser in the December 2011 edition of Perspectives on Politics. I am enough of an outsider to International Relations theory to have missed the "war on paradigmism". I'm glad to hear that it has apparently been won. The next challenge, according to Nexon: What should we...
The Brits are looking to strip Asma al-Assad of her UK citizenship, this in the wake of the imposition of various sanctions on her and family members of other Assad associates. Familial sanctions are an increasingly common practice, on the theory that you really get at the bad guys when you deprive their spouses of shopping trips to world capitals. (In...
Opinions here, with an eight-Justice majority for the result, with the case kicked back downstairs for resolution on the merits. In the long run, this could prove a watershed decision. The Court rejects the "textual commitment" and "no manageable standards" bases for applying the political question doctrine. Neither has ever made a lot of sense to me on their own...
The Hudson Institute's John Fonte has a new book out, Sovereignty or Submission: Will American Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? (Encounter Books). From the title you don't have to know John to know what his answer would be. Fonte is an unabashed sovereigntist, vaunting its "Philadelphian" strain (located in the people, as opposed to the Westphalian variant based...
In case you missed it, Rick Santorum asserted earlier this month that it's open season on old people in the Netherlands - that euthanasia accounts for 10% of all deaths and that the elderly walk around with "Do Not Euthanize" bracelets in the way of medical alerts. Nothing new on the home front: it's long been red meat for Republicans to...
For those of you no longer getting the New York Times in print, this was the lead story in today's paper. (Somewhat weirdly, it shows up on the webpage as a blog post.) Apple's signing on to Fair Labor Association standards and auditing is probably the biggest thing ever to happen in the world of private, rights-related codes of conduct....
Just a note to point you to OJ's Twitter feed, which you can find here. We link to posts on the blog, but there's also added content in the form of pointers to other items that might be of interest to OJ readers. For those of you that haven't taken up the habit, some serious material is floating around the Twitterverse...
This op-ed from today's NYT reinforces a new orientation towards Mass Atrocity Response Operations (the name of a project founded by Sarah Sewall out of the Kennedy School that is enjoying some traction with the Obama Administration). Drones can be deployed in reconnaissance efforts to detect and document human rights violations. The twist here: it doesn't have to be governments doing the reconnoitering. Drones...
The Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) continues to prompt intense opposition from Americans overseas. In my post below, I suggested that some would simply take their citizenship underground, on the expectation of imperfect enforcement and the continuing value of holding a US passport -- becoming, in effect, secret Americans. Others are predicting that large numbers of Americans abroad will shed...
