Chevron wins a big Alien Tort Statute verdict in a case involving its alleged complicity in killings by Nigerian security forces. This is no doubt an important case (though probably not as important at Andrew McCarthy thinks it is -- see "Sovereignty, Vindicated" over at NRO). On the heels of a lower-profile case last year involving Drummond that...
Peter Raven-Hansen has a review of Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency in the latest American Journal of International Law which includes some thoughts on law professors as top government lawyers. His basic line, with John Yoo as the example: better not to use a perch in the government to validate your academic theories. But in this fact lies a risk for...
UGA Law School will be a hosting a conference on international commercial arbitration fifty years after the New York Convention on January 29. Announcement here. Featured will be Gary Born, who has a major new treatise on the subject; other participants will include George Bermann and Andreas Lowenfeld. Looks like good stuff....
Or should that be President of the World? The global reactions have been overwhelming, not the least because Obama carries in himself a mixed global identity. As Philippe Sands put it: “People feel he is a part of them because he has this multiracial, multiethnic and multinational dimension. He represents, for people in so many different communities and cultures, a...
Obama has an aunt who is present in the United States in violation of the immigration laws. So what? Lots of American citizens and legal immigrants have undocumented alien family members. See this report from the Urban Institute on so-called mixed-status families, that is, nuclear families in which some members are citizens, some not. For example, the study estimates that...
As we enter in the election home-stretch, there have been some tit-for-tat allegations about foreign money ending up in presidential candidate coffers. The GOP has filed this complaint with the FEC alleging Obama to have accepted more than $30 million in questionable donations (the document cites a speech by Libya's Moammar Ghadafi for support). Obama has returned the...
Over at the excellent polls/politics site FiveThirtyEight, Sean Quinn describes an Obama volunteer working doors in Virginia: Back in Charlottesville, we encountered Alex Englehard, a German from Heidelberg pursuing his legal degree and on break after his fifth-year exams. Englehard, a dedicated full-time Obama volunteer, said many Americans "don't realize how big an impact this one election has on the rest of...
In a sign of increasing election-eve desperation on the Right, respectable Republicans (Andrew McCarthy, for one) appear now to be taking seriously the argument that Obama does not meet constitutional eligibility requirements for the presidency. A suit has been filed in Pennsylvania seeking declarative relief to that effect, on two grounds: 1) he was born not in Hawaii but...
Conventional wisdom would have that state and local regulation of immigration works against noncitizen interests. A story like Hazleton's (tinpot mayor making political hay out of undocumented immigration) makes for good copy, and it plays into the persistent liberal mindset that the federal government will better protect rights generally and immigrant rights particularly. Amazing how that survived even after the 1996 rout...
Sarah Palin in last night's debate: America is in a position to help. What I've done in my position to help, as the governor of a state that's pretty rich in natural resources, we have a $40 billion investment fund, a savings fund called the Alaska Permanent Fund. When I and others in the legislature found out we had some millions of dollars...
I think so, even though it's not obviously consistent with the requirement restricting presidential eligibility to "natural born" citizens. I make the case in this essay, just posted as part of a symposium on McCain's constitutional eligibility (in light of his Canal Zone birth) at the Michigan Law Review's online First Impressions (with other contributions from Jack Chin, Larry Solum, Daniel Tokaji,...
I think it’s over. As is true with notational wars, it takes another, more serious threat to take care of the displacement. The end isn’t in the way of armistice or surrender. The wars on drugs and crime continue to be fought under more prosaic headings, but they no longer have a hold on the national imagination. And in the...
