In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Peter Spiro

26 Sep

Here's the latest: the Western Climate Initiative among seven US governors and four Canadian provincial premiers, takes shape to create a market-based cap-and-trade emissions reduction program (report here from the NY Times). The program emerges from the terms of this February 2007 agreement.  Leaving aside the question of whether this qualifies as a compact (sure looks like one), are this and similar undertakings...

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25 Sep

Noah Feldman has this long think piece in the New York Times Magazine.  Feldman deftly describes for an intelligent lay audience a fork-in-the-road moment for the Court and its posture towards international law and institutions.  We have the sovereigntists on the one hand and the internationalists on the other.  Each had a major win last Term, the internationalists with Boumediene...

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20 Sep

The letters section of the Times is probably not long for the world but it does still have the function of pulling out pithy representative statements from what would otherwise be lost in the haystack of the paper's website comments section.  So here's this from Northwestern University lawprof Steve Calabresi on Adam Liptak's excellent piece from Friday on the flagging international stature of...

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01 Sep

Turns out (along with who knows what else) that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, active enough to have attended its statewide convention in 1994. The party argues that Alaska's accession by referendum in 1958 violated international law, insofar as voters were not given the choice of independence in addition to the ballot options of statehood or continued status...

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25 Aug

Some hard-working soul on the Democratic vice presidential vetting team had to make her way through a law review article Joe Biden co-authored in the late 1980's on constitutional war powers. The piece is pretty safe stuff, advocating a "joint decision model" for use-of-force decisionmaking. In the course of proposing some tinkering with the War Powers Resolution, there is this...

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10 Aug

We don’t insist that our major-league ball players come from the cities that they play for. Why should we demand any more from Olympic athletes? The Beijing Games includes more athletes with tenuous ties to the country whose flag they followed into Friday’s opening ceremonies. There are some who have jumped states in search of better-funded Olympic programs. Others couldn't...

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05 Aug

Okay, so Medellin himself is going down. But as Julian highlights above, Texas has now undertaken to extend some sort of review and reconsideration to others covered by the Avena judgment. Why the quiet retreat? Here's some totally unsupported speculation: this is the result of a deal between Texas and Mexico. The GOM is sophisticated enough to understand...

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28 Jul

I'm not surprised that Ben (as one of the new foreign policy pragmatists) says he's amenable to international law as part of an anti-terror answer (assuming that that a legal fix of any description is necessary -- I hope we'll hear from Deborah Pearlstein with her argument that we don't need to change international law, either). But it's...

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28 Jul

This is a great book and there's a lot to chew on here.  By way of taking up Ben's opening volley, I have two general thoughts:  1) things may need some fixing, but not necessarily at the foundational level framed in the book, and 2) to the extent things do need fixing, international law has to be in the picture. The first point...

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25 Jul

. . . and I bet you are, too.  In a recent move ostensibly aimed at shoring up its national identity, Germany has instituted a citizenship test.  Naturalization applicants must correctly answer 17 out of 33 multiple-choice questions on German institutions and society.  The questions are drawn from a catalogue of 310 questions that test-takers are given in advance. Try your luck here.  For most,...

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18 Jul

Something I missed while I was away: a substantial new tax on Americans who want out.  As its name implies, the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2008 (will some self-respecting legislator please put a stop to bill names adding up to forced acronyms) is mostly about tax relief for service members and veterans.  But there is also a...

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17 Jul

This item should take care of it, not the least because it appears on the op-ed page of the New York Times.  The question of McCain's presidential eligibility, in light of his Canal Zone nativity, flared up again with the posting of this piece by Jack Chin (along with this report by Adam Liptak).  Chin persuasively documents why McCain wasn't a citizen at...

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