In a strange move, the Supreme Court on Monday affirmed the ATS Apartheid case of Khulamani v. Barclay Bank (recaptioned at the Supreme Court as American Isuzu Motors v. Ntsebeza). The stated reason? The Court lacked a quorum. From the docket sheet: Because the Court lacks a quorum, 28 U.S.C. § 1, and since a majority of the...
Boring tax case, interesting international law issue. That's how I would summarize Jamieson v. CIR. The issue in Jamieson is what happens if a treaty says one thing, a subsequent statute conflicts with that treaty, and then there is a subsequent treaty change to the conflicting treaty provision, but that amendment does not remove the conflict. Under...
One of the more intriguing questions from the oral argument in the child rape death penalty case of Kennedy v. Louisiana is whether evolving standards of decency are a one-way ratchet. Here is Justice Stevens' question from the oral argument last month: [O]ne question that interests me but is a little divorced from the terms of the arguments so far....
Earlier this week the WTO Appellate Body clarified the role of legal precedent in WTO jurisprudence. The background to the discussion was a WTO panel’s refusal to follow a previous Appellate Body decision because the panel viewed the previous Appellate Body decision as failing to accord proper deference to permissible Member State interpretations. The details of the panel decision...
As regular readers know, I have been critical of Washington & Lee's move toward a third-year experiential learning program, fearing that it would marginalize international law courses. Well, those fears were put to rest yesterday when the faculty at W&L unanimously approved a mandatory three-hour first-year Transnational Law course. The description of the course is as follows: This...
Now here is a great legal question regarding geographic appellations: Is the term "lesbian" something that the residents of Lesbos, Greece have a legal entitlement to prevent others from misusing? The Associate Press has the story: A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world's gay women....
The American Lawyer has just published a great article on the future of law firms. The bottom line: successful law firms will be global operations with thousands of lawyers led by an elite group of partners with staggering profits-per-partner. Here is an excerpt: The projections make it clear that U.S. corporate law firms of the future will be...
Last week a Florida state court rendered an interesting decision on the scope of application of the Warsaw Convention. The court recognized that state tort law is preempted by the Warsaw Convention, but the critical question in Bowe v. Worldwide Flight Services was at what point in exiting a plane does the application of the treaty end and state...
I think there is more to Bellinger’s speech on the United States and the ICC than Julian suggests. Let me just summarize the best parts of the speech. First, Bellinger emphasizes that the ICC is not a partisan issue: A relatively straight line runs from the positions on the ICC taken by our Congress in 1990, to those of...
Here is a sample of some of the wonderful map art of Susan Stockwell: Fleece England...
One of the unintended consequences of the movement to hold corporations liable for aiding and abetting human rights abuses is that doing so may prove to be the most effective way of holding sovereigns accountable. That is the surprising conclusion of my latest article just published in the Notre Dame Law Review. Here is an excerpt: One has...
One of my students recently took the naturalization test and was kind enough to share with me the “Quick Civic Lessons” that the government hands out to help prepare for the test. Most questions are terribly easy, but I would suspect a few are hard for the average would-be American: 15. Who Elects the President of the United States? 19....
