Mary Dudziak has started up a new legal history blog. Mary has done terrific work of interest to those of us in foreign relations law, especially her book situating the civil rights movement in the international context of the Cold War. Welcome to the blogosphere! ...
Some prominent coverage in the last couple of days of Nicaragua's recent enactment of a total prohibition on abortion - see front page stories here and here in the Boston Globe and Washington Post. The reports suggest plans to take the law to the Inter-American Commission and the UN Human Rights Council. The WaPo story also mentions protests...
Here's video of State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger's talk earlier this week inaugurating Duke's international law center. It's a broadly sweeping effort to justify the Bush Administration's posture to international law as one that isn't antagonistic. A primary theme: most of our differences with the Europeans in particular are policy differences, not legal ones. One thing...
Whoops, that’s the Alliance of Civilizations, and here’s the final report of its “High-Level Group”. Who knew? Forgive me for being cynical, but if blue-ribbon commissions are having a tough time of it on the domestic front (that sound you’re about to hear is the crash and burn of the Baker study group), query whether they’re likely to have...
I was struck yesterday by how much of a special NY Times section on giving involved giving across borders. Where the Carnegies of the last gilded age focused their charity at home, this era’s new magnates are decidedly international in their scope. But it’s not just magnates that have shifted their focus - check out this piece on...
We are delighted to host Janet Levit of the University of Tulsa Law School for a guest stint with us for the next two weeks. You can find Janet's scholarly work here, which focuses on international financial and human rights issues (I highly recommend among the others the Yale Journal of International Law article on "bottom-up" lawmaking in the...
Steve Clemons thinks that among other things we’ll see the CIA’s secret detention centers be de-funded “for sure” and that we’ll see a “modern version of public hangings” in the form of oversight hearings on Iraq-related issues. Roger similarly suggests below that there will be sharp confrontation on executive power. I wonder. Executive power and detainee treatment...
The WaPo story here. As the International Criminal Court shows itself to be a responsible institution (note the report that prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has rejected several hundred petitions to initiate actions against US officials), the policy fear factor inevitably dissipates, and the possible strategic benefits for the US come into clearer focus. But how long will it take to overcome...
From the October 3, 2000, Bush-Gore presidential debate:MODERATOR: New question. How would you go about as president deciding when it was in the national interest to use U.S. force, generally? BUSH: Well, if it's in our vital national interest, and that means whether our territory is threatened or people could be harmed, whether or not the alliances are -- our...
The story here (not clear why this should have been in the Metro section of the Times, although there are more column inches here than this kind of story usually gets). This isn't the first migration-related case for the Commission, and it won't be the last (especially with the recent proliferation of law school human rights clinics, with a...
Thanks to Cesare Romano for some terrific blogging during the last two weeks. (I'd recommend them all, but his last post below is especially entertaining and ambitious.) We'll hope to have Cesare back again soon for another guest stint! ...
See this report from a "Focus on the Family" site, which frets that the new focus on international law is "lessening [future lawyers] respect for the Constitution." ...
