Bill Dodge has an interesting piece on customary international law and Sosa that was recently published on SSRN. It is worth a read, particularly in light of our online workshop on the piece by Jack Goldsmith, Curtis Bradley, and David Moore. Here is Dodge's abstract: This paper explores the role of customary international law in the U.S. legal system...
Jeane Kirkpatrick died yesterday. Here is the New York Times obituary. And here is an excerpt from her 1979 article, Dictatorships and Double Standards, in Commentary that launched her political career: Fulfilling the duties and discharging the functions of representative government make heavy demands on leaders and citizens, demands for participation and restraint, for consensus and compromise. It is...
A very prominent scholar requesting anonymity emailed me to challenge my post yesterday regarding Second Life. He writes, I am surprised that you of all people, with your knowledge of arbitration, think that second world is lawless. For two reasons it is not remotely lawless. First, it has elaborate choice of law and choice of forum provisions. ...
In the past week or so Julian and Duncan have had interesting posts about applying laws to terra nullius and moon stations. (See here and here). But there is yet another world in which we are in unchartered waters headed to virgin territory: the virtual world. By now we have long wrestled with electronic commerce and...
I am just now beginning to make my way through the Iraq Study Group report issued today. I wanted to raise one small but interesting issue relating to Justice O'Connor's service on the study group. We all know various historical examples in which a sitting or former justice served an important political function (John Jay, Robert Jackson, Earl...
To the best of my knowledge the issue of constitutional comparativism did not come up in the voluntary school integration cases that were argued today. (Please correct me if I am wrong. See transcripts here and here). But there were two important amici briefs that squarely presented the issue. (See here for the brief of Human Rights...
I read with great interest the letter from President Ahmadinejad to the American people. I was struck by two things in the letter: the beginning sentence which beckons Allah to bestow on humanity the "perfect human being"--an apparent reference to “Twelfth Imam" and the Islamic apocalyptic vision. This call echoes a similar call in September in his...
One of the most interesting issues in the oral argument yesterday in Massachusetts v. EPA is how the standing doctrine may force the Court to make a threshold assessment as to whether global warming is injurious. Justice Kennedy put it succinctly when he questioned the "reassuring statement that we need not decide about global warming in this case." ...
The transcript in the global warming case of Massachusetts v. EPA (available here) raises interesting issues regarding foreign relations and treaty negotiations. But at bottom the case is about core principles of administrative law relating to agency authority and obligation to act pursuant to congressional mandate. The key reason the EPA decided to continue scientific investigations and decline...
This semester I took Peter Spiro's suggestion to heart and assigned my international law students to write a Wikipedia entry as a small part of their class requirements. The only limits I put on the students was to pick a topic that was relevant to international law and that was not currently included in Wikipedia (or at most was...
When I am reviewing developments regarding international law to report here on Opinio Juris, I regularly have to separate the wheat from the chaff. For every case I report about an interesting international law development there are a dozen others that I entertain. Those dog cases are surprisingly interesting and sometimes humorous. They provide a unique insight...
We have certain images in our minds about that first Thanksgiving. It usually involves bountiful harvests, amicable relations with the Indians, and prayerful thanksgiving to Providence for his manifold blessings. Well, it wasn't quite that simple. Although there are various versions of the "first Thanksgiving," one event that has a strong claim to it occurred at Plymouth,...
