Hannah Buxbaum has just posted on SSRN an interesting article on "Transnational Regulatory Litigation." You can download the document here. In particular she includes an illuminating section on global class actions. Here is the abstract: Recent years have seen much debate about the role of national courts in addressing global harms. That debate has focused on the application...
There was an interesting little sidebar comment from Justice Scalia in yesterday's death penalty decision in Kansas v. Marsh. Scalia said that: There exists in some parts of the world sanctimonious criticism of America's death penalty, as somehow unworthy of a civilized society. (I say sanctimonious, because most of the countries to which these finger-waggers belong had the death penalty...
I would not normally post about something as vapid as celebrity interviews on CNN, but I happened to watch the encore presentation of Anderson Cooper's interview with Angelina Jolie over the weekend. (Transcript available here). What was a pleasant surprise for me was that Jolie came across as believable and quite sincere about her work with the United Nations. You...
As reported in yesterday's post, a survey by Pew Research Center entitled "The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other" reveals the startling news that Muslim majorities in numerous countries do not believe that Arabs carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks. But there is plenty of other other news from that poll that is worthy of...
Ok this is really scary. According to a poll released today by the Pew Research Center "majorities in Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan say that they do not believe groups of Arabs carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks." This is in addition to significant minorities of Muslims polled in France, Germany, Spain, Pakistan, and Nigeria who shared the...
Kim Sokchea of the International University of Japan has just posted on SSRN an interesting empirical study confirming what has long been expected: that bilateral investment treaties (BITs) "play a significant role in stimulating the inflows of foreign investment." You can download the article here. Here is the abstract: Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are commonly regarded as one of the policy...
The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a report on Challenges for a Postelection Mexico. It takes a very cautious approach to any proposal for significant change on immigration and encourages a more aggressive approach to trade promotion for Mexican products. The focus of the report includes direct assistance to Mexico as a mechanism to stem the...
Opinio Juris has been receiving a significant number of hits in recent days from Google searches for “North American Union.” The hits relate to a post by Julian Ku regarding last year's report by the Council on Foreign Relations on a proposed North American Community. All this traffic made me quite curious as to what was generated...
Last week we did a poll asking whether Ahmadinejad should be allowed to attend the World Cup. The poll seemed to express a strong preference to keep politics out of the World Cup, with 55% voting that Ahmadinejad should be allowed to attend Iranian matches in Germany. Now that Iran is out of the picture, the question of whether Ahmadinejad...
Colleen Graffy, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, has been in hot water this week for her remark that the three suicides at Guantanamo Bay were a "PR stunt." She did not actually use those words, which were quoted as verbatim from the BBC and ignited the controversy. There is no BBC link to the transcript...
This week I am in Dallas, Texas participating in a conference sponsored by the Institute for Transnational Arbitration on the subject of Investment Treaty Arbitration in the 21st Century. Details here. The focus of the conference was on investment arbitration before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The keynote speaker for the conference...
Richard Steinberg and Jonathan Zasloff of UCLA have just posted on SSRN their ASIL centennial essay on "Power and International Law" to be published in the American Journal of International Law. In a sense it is a nice summary of the movement of international law scholarship over the past 100 years. The article is available for download here. ...
