For a while there, it looked as if there might be a real fight over Harold Koh's nomination as State Department Legal Adviser. The Republicans have been casting about for a nomination that they could defeat on some issue of principle (that is, over something not involving a nominee's tax returns), along the lines of Lani Guinier's failed nomination...
Interesting item from The Economist here. It is becoming increasingly clear that any important international process or institution is going to be held to transparency norms. And where there is power, there must also be accountability. In the dispute resolution context, that takes the form of NGO participation. Why shouldn't NGOs be able to participate in proceedings with public policy...
Paul Krugman's Friday column has to weigh heavily on anyone with a 7-year-old boy. The parallels are clear, at least on the back end. Krugman is hardly the first to play the Norman Angell card. Angell's ill-timed proclamation of the end of war in the run-up to the Guns of August figures prominently in the opening chapter...
Here. And who knew that there was an Association of Public Diplomacy Scholars, and that one can get a master's degree in the field? Public diplomacy's rise among both policymakers and academics has been pretty dramatic. In the government, what used to be a backwater, both in main State's public affairs bureau and in the now defunct US Information Agency, was...
Michael Glennon doesn't pull any punches in the latest AJIL (also available on SSRN here) in going after the report of the Miller Center's National War Powers Commission. The report advances an "illusory solution to a nonproblem", with "baffling" and "flatly unconstitutional" proposals for reform. The piece is particularly scornful of the panel's call to formalize a presidential free pass...
This recent survey shows that the major academic journals in political science are publishing more articles on human rights than they once did. No surprise there. Perhaps more interesting number would be to see how many relate to international law more generally. As with flagship law reviews, I suspect those numbers are up as well, perhaps dramatically....
Two items suggesting the possibility. First is this excellent piece from Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, which sets out a strong case for the inevitability of global economic regulation (he is particularly interesting on the increasingly global scope of big labor). Meyerson draws on the old New Deal analogy, which is a powerful one -- up to...
No "citizen of the world" talk today. I was a little surprised at the fairly pronounced us/them premise of the speech, a worldview still defined by states. And no nods to international institutions, even as a general proposition. Of course Obama is the President of the United States (and most Americans certainly expect the national framing), but if I were...
Barclays Bank v. Franchise Tax Board (1994) was a case that some of us (those who started teaching in the mid 90s) saw as a breakthrough case on foreign relations federalism, a sharp turn from Zschernig and the 'one voice' line of foreign commerce clause cases. As Jack Goldsmith wrote in 1999, for instance, "Barclays Bank marks a return to...
John Bolton and John Yoo have this op-ed in today's NY Times vaunting Article II treaties over congressional-executive agreements. While conceding the fact of CEAs in the international economic context, the duo argues that going the CEA route for such agreements as the ICC and a successor to the Kyoto protocol "would pose a serious challenge to American principles...
No, I don't mean Obama's foreign policy. The Foreign Relations of the United States is the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity; and these days it's in trouble. The tip of the iceberg is the fracas described here and here between the Historian of the Department of State Marc Susser and the Advisory Committee on...
John Fonte had this piece in the National Review just before the election on the Obama's likely posture to international law and international institutions. It very perceptively and succinctly describes the difference between liberal internationalists (think just about everybody before Bush, with the US looking to lead the rest of the world to enlightenment, along with anyone associated with the...
