Stranger things have happened. The Carnegie Council's Ethics & International Affairs, a quarterly journal with consistently thoughtful interdisciplinary material, has this essay in its summer issue by Campbell Craig on the resurgence of the idea of world government. Craig finds three strands in recent thinking on the question, which basically boil down to why, how and and whether. The ''why' will...
At most of the museums here in Rome, children get reduced-price or free admission only if they are EU citizens. For us weakened-dollar Americans, that makes a nontrivial difference. We are going to the Villa Borghese later today. At 13€ per person, with two kids, that will be 52 Euros – more than 75 bucks. A...
As part of the effort to prove itself more like other disciplines and to move away from the trade school model, there's been a clear trend towards peer-reviewed law journals. Witness this out of Harvard, for law generally. It's a move mostly to be applauded, with the caution that peer review can perpetuate orthodoxies in a way that...
Here's my review in the New York Obsever of Benjamin Wittes' new book, Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror. The book is a must read for foreign relations law specialists, in many ways a companion volume to Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency. Where Jack gives us the inside acount, Ben's...
Okay, in Rome, not Geneva, but the point holds. Following in Duncan's footsteps, I've been teaching here for the month in a Temple Law summer program. On Friday, we had an interesting visit to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, which is headquartered here, with presentations by several lawyers in the agency's legal service. It was interesting stuff. FAO has its...
Roger points to the importance of territory in marking the boundaries of citizenship. The other key element in constitutional cartography has been citizenship status, at least since Reid v. Covert. When it comes to enjoying the protection of the Constitution abroad, as a general matter citizens get it, noncitizens don’t. Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Boumediene appears to slice at that in...
Adam Liptak has an excellent front-page story in today's NYT situating the US approach to hate speech in the international context (as part of his series “American Exception"). Together with Jeremy Waldron’s recent New York Review of Books piece on the subject, could this be the leading edge of possible constitutional adjustment? It would have been mostly unthinkable as recently...
Ken's already up on the boards below, but I just wanted to add our official welcome to him for the coming week as a guest blogger. I'm confident that Ken is known to most of you for his always engaging and provocative scholarship as well as his eclectic blogging on Law of War and Just War Theory Blog (where...
Chimene detects some nostalgia in Beyond Citizenship's suggestion that America may be unsustainable in the long run. But how could I not be nostalgic? I'm an American, and America has had a pretty good run of it. At least I recognize the nostalgia. One thing that is both fascinating and frustrating about engaging on citizenship issues...
Thanks to Ken for injecting the Ignatieff observation, with which I emphatically disagree! Nation-states are useful handmaidens to the superclass, but the real elites could do just fine without them, thank you very much. It's nice to have safe streets in places New York and London, but that's the business of local governments, not national ones. In...
John wonders if I'm being too deterministic in my analysis, and Cristina also clearly sees some possibilities in citizenship policymaking. I agree that there are some important policy choices on the table, such as the ones Cristina discusses in the context of circular migration. But at the core I think there is zero chance of moving citizenship practice...
I'm not going directly to take on Jon's latest post on naturalization rates. It's quite complicated, and Jon's correct that it has to take into account flows and stock. It's clear that the rate has been rising. For those interested in a detailed analysis, check out this report by Jeffrey Passel from the Pew Hispanic Center. ...
