The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum begins tomorrow in Davos, the small chalet town that has now become synonomous with power in the era of globalization, a sort of latter-day collective Versailles. It does seem that the lead-up to this year's meeting is getting less attention than in recent years (though we now have daily blogging from...
Here's what I see up on the web by way of spring IL colloquiua. Jeff Dunoff and I are convening one here at Temple, with a terrific line-up including Paul Schiff Berman, Bill Burke-White, David Zaring, Oona Hathaway, David Luban, Joost Pauwelyn, David Luban, and Catherine Powell. Duke (Curt Bradley, Ralf Michaels, Joost Pauwelyn) Georgetown (Carlos Vazquez) University of Georgia (Dan Bodansky...
It seems that quite a few prominent law firms are establishing climate change practice groups, among them Pillsbury Winthrop, Latham & Watkins, Davis Wright Tremaine, and Hunton & Williams. This shouldn't be very surprising. Even if the US government has yet to sign on to Kyoto, transnational corporations will have to deal with that and other emissions regimes...
The story here (also fronted in the FT). With half a trillion dollars in annual sales, this effort of Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour and Metro — the world's four largest superstores — is bound to be of consequence. One question mark: can a code such as this, labeled the Global Social Compliance Program and purporting to regulate the...
An impressive array of academics (including Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry) and think-tank heavyweights (Ivo Daalder among them) are lining up behind the idea of institutionalizing an alliance of true democracies to advance effective and legitimate global governance. It's a central recommendation of the final report of the Princeton Project on National Security (which includes a draft charter for...
His comment here in the Guardian, in which he (in effect) takes up the possibility of life imitating art, in this case, the dramatic visions of prosecuting Tony Blair for the crime of aggression in committing British troops to Iraq. Sounds far-fetched, but Sands is articulate as always. ...
A baby that would otherwise have otherwise won a $25,000 savings bond as the first baby born in the new year was disqualified because her mother is an undocumented immigrant (story here). What makes this episode remarkable is that I can't think of any other context in which a child born in the US (a full citizen, of course, as...
This from yesterday's story in the Times on the Padilla case: The seven taped phone calls that bear Mr. Padilla’s voice involve conversations with Mr. Hassoun from 1997 to 2000. On those calls, Mr. Padilla, unlike some of the other defendants, does not employ what the government says is coded language. According to the government, other defendants refer to their...
I tend to agree with Roger's sober assessment of the value of blogging — if we can till a small patch of otherwise unplowed soil, that's something accomplished, but we shouldn't assume much more value than that. One sign that the blogging phenomenon may have peaked is the number of abandoned blogs one comes across these days — blogs...
The print edition of yesterday's NY Times had an above-the-fold story about the possibilities for immigration reform in the new Congress under the headline, "Bipartisan Group Drafting Bill for a New Path to Citizenship". I still don't quite get the framing of this latest round of immigration politics in citizenship terms. The question is who will get permanent...
On the heels of this stunt, see this op-ed co-authored by Harvard lawprof Robert Mnookin in the IHT as well as this from Crooked Timber's Belgian contributor Ingrid Robeyns. Perhaps Belgium will pave the way to the deconstruction of some non-East Bloc states. And why not, especially under the umbrella of the EU? How sentimental can one...
See the story here. The French city of St Denis has named a street after Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose 1982 conviction on murder charges continues to generate controversy. The street naming was condemned in a recent congressional resolution, putting Philadelphia representative and now-mayoral candidate Chaka Fattah in something of a hot seat (he did vote in favor of the...
