In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Roger Alford

07 Apr

McKinsey Quarterly has published an interesting article on how corporations should respond to emerging social trends. The article suggests that the case for corporations incorporating an awareness of developing social and political trends is now overwhelming. The article highlights numerous examples, including social attitudes about global warming, genetically modified organisms, fair labor standards and broader "frontier expectations." It is...

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06 Apr

Harold Koh is having a brilliant career: Supreme Court clerk, advocate for Haitian refugees, seminal scholar, public servant under the Clinton Administration, dean of the Yale Law School. These are the things we think of when we think of Harold Koh. But what does Google think of Harold Koh? Google Harold Koh and one of...

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06 Apr

Those who follow human rights know that each year the State Department publishes an annual country report on the status of human rights in virtually every country in the world. But what be lost on many is that the USTR publishes something similar for trade. It is called the National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers (NTE)...

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05 Apr

Foreign Affairs will publish in May/June a report on the Pentagon's secret study of Saddam Hussein's regime. The study, Saddam's Delusions: The View From the Inside, tries to address the 2003 war in Iraq from the perspective of Saddam Hussein. Here are some of the highlights of the report: Did Iraq have WMD? No...

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04 Apr

My vote for the most important international law case for the month of March is Garb v. Poland, 2006 WL 515500 (2d. Cir. 2006). The case was brought by Jewish persons and entities who owned real property in Poland from 1939 to 1945. The issue of the restoring real property that was taken during the Holocaust is one of the...

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03 Apr

Justice Holmes famously argued that “If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer...

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03 Apr

Interesting summary of a recent speech by Colin Powell addressing Iraq, Palestine, China, Russia, Europe, globalization, and immigration. Best line: "My favorite [Powell joke] was about buying all State Department employees Blackberries (when he arrived the State Dept. still had Wang Computers so he wired every desk and bought them all Blackberries), but that one employee was using it as a...

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02 Apr

When I teach the introductory international law class to my students, one of the more difficult aspects of the discussion is the line between customary state practices that rise to the level of binding norms, and those that do not. We all teach Paquete Habana, and the students' eyes glaze over as we passionately discuss the law of prize and...

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01 Apr

A federal district court in Washington yesterday declared the presence of “nonconsenting American troops” in Iraq unconstitutional and ordered the Bush Administration to cease further deployment of any American soldiers in Iraq, to the extent those soldiers were members of the class action. The case, Sherman v. Rumsfeld, was brought as a class action on behalf of current soldiers...

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31 Mar

On Thursday the members of the American Society of International Law voted by a significant majority to adopt a resolution concerning jus in bello and jus ad bellum. The full text is available here. During the discussion, approximately twelve persons rose to urge the membership to pass the resolution and four urged that the resolution be voted down. ...

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30 Mar

The international arbitration community is abuzz with the news that Dr. Wang Sengchang, one of the top officials at the China International Economy and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC) was arrested. CIETAC has a virtual monopoly on arbitrations that occur in China and it has had a checkered history of success in securing investor confidence in the dispute resolution mechanism. ...

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