In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Peter Spiro

11 May

It doesn't look like she's written anything even remotely related to international law (it is surprising how little she's written on anything, for an academic). On the now-standard question of what role IL should have in constitutional interpretation, we have this out-on-a-limb answer from her confirmation as Solicitor General: I do not believe that international law (assuming it has not been incorporated...

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29 Apr

Arizona's already notorious anti-immigrant measure, enacted last week and making unauthorized presence in the U.S. a crime under state law, isn't likely to last long.  But the courts may have nothing to do with its demise.  It's the economic hit that Arizona is clearly going to take that will bring the state around, I suspect sooner rather than later.  Lost...

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14 Jan

There are an estimated 45,000 US citizens in Haiti, and there's an assumption that they should be first in line to receive US assistance.  As Hillary Clinton said yesterday, "They are our principal responsibility, to make sure that they're safe, to evacuate those who need medical care."  In his remarks this morning, President Obama stressed that "We will not rest...

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06 Aug

Eugene Volokh has this post on the merits of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.  He's against it.  Volokh highlights several operative provisions that he finds objectionable on policy grounds, and argues that we shouldn't sign on to treaties that we don't intend to comply with. What's striking about the post is the exceptionalist premise that US isolation...

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28 Jul

I want to pick up on Tim Zick's post touching on the normative implications of territoriality.  It's clear that intraterritoriality (a nice tag coined by Kal to describe internal territorial variability in law) facilitated exploitation and imperial abuses.  Guantanamo amounts to a failed intraterritorial strategy. Those are the obvious cases.  I'd be curious where Kal comes out on the closer ones,...

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27 Jul

Thanks to Kal for joining us to discuss his terrific new book. I’m on board with the premise that international politics goes a long way to explaining the arc of U.S. foreign relations law, including rules relating to territoriality; and Kal is absolutely correct that US law scholars pay too little heed to the global context as an explanation for doctrinal...

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15 Jul

I just finished chatting with Lou Dobbs on his CNN radio show about the latest among those who still deny Obama's eligibility to be president.  A major in the reserves has balked at being shipped out to Iraq on the theory that Obama is not the commander-in-chief and the war is therefore illegal under international law.  Deniers (aka "birthers") also...

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14 Jul

With nothing much else to work with, Collin Levy presses the international law angle on Sotomayor with this op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal. In a speech to the American Civil Liberties Union of Puerto Rico in April, Judge Sotomayor explained that "ideas have no boundaries," and that "international law and foreign law will be very important in the discussion...

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13 Jul

So far in opening statements from Sotomayor confirmation hearings, we have John Cornyn and Tom Coburn condemning the use of foreign law in constitutional interpretation. You can be sure that they will follow up in colloquys -- in Cornyn's, possibly his first. (Michael Chertoff made it one of his suggested questions on the Times op-ed page this morning;...

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