The Liberty Forum has just posted a debate on sovereignty in the age of globalization between John Yoo, John Cerone, and yours truly. Here's a taste of the exchange, which I encourage you to read in its entirety. From John Yoo's post: Globalization has led to (1) the explosive growth in international trade; (2) the swift creation of international markets in...
I generally subscribe to a constructivist theory of international relations. On many issues I do not think state interests are fixed and this fluidity allows a space for norm entrepreneurs to alter state preferences. With any successful campaign, specific actors promote ideas that catch fire and create a norm cascade reflected in consensus on the appropriate path. That consensus often...
Opinio Juris is pleased to announce an online symposium addressing social activism and international law. As our readers know, Kony 2012 was a YouTube sensation, spreading faster than any video in history. Although the details are airbrushed, the central theme of the video is about international law. The key idea of the video is that the indicted fugitive Joseph Kony...
Dean Paul Schiff Berman has a new book entitled Global Legal Pluralism (Cambridge University Press 2012) that I heartily recommend to our readers. Here's the abstract: We live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, supranational, and nonstate communities. Navigating these...
Speaking at a Federalist Society meeting yesterday at Notre Dame Law School, former Ambassador John Bolton addressed what the Obama Administration should do to curtail the threat of Iran. He offered not a single word of praise for the Obama Administration's foreign policy and not a single word of criticism for the Bush Administration, such as its failure to...
Last week I had the good fortune to attend a reception in Washington D.C. with various arbitration luminaries announcing the inauguration of the Jerusalem Arbitration Center. With almost $5 billion in annual trade between Palestine and Israel, it is imperative to establish a neutral forum for resolving business disputes. JAC is established under the auspices of the...
Here are some choice quotes from the ASIL annual meeting, all taken out of context for maximum effect: The real problem with cyber-security is that Viagra is too expensive. ~ Christopher Soghoian International arbitration is like a Jackson Pollock painting. There is order, but it takes an expert in fractal geometry to see it. ...
Kudos to Daniel Chow and Mike Koehler for a wonderful conference last week at Ohio State Law School addressing the FCPA at thirty-five. It’s always a risk to hold a conference that mingles hard-core practitioners with soft and fuzzy academics, but this one seemed to work. The defense and prosecution side of the FCPA bar battled it out...
Kudos to Chris Whytock for a wonderful conference yesterday at UC Irvine addressing the topic of human rights litigation in state courts and under state law. The timing of the conference could not have been better, coming on the heels of the Kiobel oral argument on Tuesday, in which the principal defense of Kathleen Sullivan was that corporations should...
Yesterday the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, has unanimously embraced the doctrine of foreign affairs field preemption. It will surely prove to be a controversial blockbuster case for foreign affairs law, with or without Supreme Court review. The case of Movsesian v. Munich Re addressed a California statute, section 354.4, that authorized California courts to entertain various insurance claims brought...
Last week the Fifth Circuit rendered a fascinating decision in McGee v. Arkel Int'l about choice-of-law rules as applied to torts in Iraq. I've never seen anything quite like the Iraqi law in question, so I thought it is worth sharing for the private international law aficionados among our readers. The Iraqi law in question, passed by the...
Harold Koh’s keynote address today at the University of Virginia conference did a nice job surveying the legal landscape from the Legal Adviser’s perspective. He divided the conflicts into four categories: non-conflicts, soft conflicts, hard conflicts, and hardest conflicts. He then outlined specific examples in his daily docket that fall into each category. Details on the...
