Today, the Supreme Court finally hears oral argument in the Medellin case. I don’t have much more to add than what SCOTUSBlog has reported here, but it strikes me that Texas is again in a very difficult position, mostly because of their own high-risk litigation strategy and also because of Medellin’s clever and effective approach.By filing a motion to stay...
Readers of my skeptical blog posts on internationalism (here and here) might be surprised and amused that I spent the past week in the heart of Old Europe at a classically internationalist confab: the Willem C. Vis International Arbitration Moot Competition. The Vis Moot draws students and lawyers from 47 different countries to Vienna to participate in arbitration...
Daniel Drezner has a post (and there are some equally interesting comments) on the ousting of the President of Kyrgyzstan. He asks whether the news from Kyrgyzstan and the recent events in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and Afghanistan are the first hints of a new “wave” of democratization, in the sense popularized by Samuel Huntington’s book The Third Wave.I hope that...
In the ongoing saga of Augusto Pinochet, the Supreme Court of Chile found that he had Head of State immunity that prevented from his being prosecuted for the killing of his predecessor, General Carlos Prats. See the BBC report here. Pinochet is also being investigated for human rights abuses under Operation Condor, which persecuted and killed left-wing opponents during the...
Last week's Economist has this excellent article (sub. req'd) summarizing some important empirical studies being done on failed states and post-conflict state building. The conclusions of a raft of recent studies give grounds for optimism: failed states and those on the brink of failure (sometimes called "Low-income countries under stress" or LICUS) can be saved with relatively low investments in...
After a ten-year process, ICRC published this week its report on the rules of customary international humanitarian law ("CIHL), i.e., customary law governing conduct during war. The full report can be downloaded here. Advance warning: I' ve been told from a reliable source in Geneva that the bound version weighs in at 300 pounds! State practice takes up one volume;...
This and other reports indicate that the oil industry is jumping on board the Law of the Sea Treaty bandwagon, setting up a battle between two key Republican constituencies: the energy industry and conservative intellectuals. According to this report, oil development companies will not invest in risky undersea oil exploration efforts until property rights over such ventures are settled....
As I sip my half pint of Weiznenbier "Edelweiss" here at Cafe Leopold in Vienna, I thought I would blog a few short posts using the cafe's free WLAN:Representatives from North Uganda visited the Hague last week to ask the ICC to hold off on arrest warrants for leaders of the Lords’ Resistance Army. As I have noted before, the...
Kofi Annan is scheduled to announce in a talk to the General Assembly today that he will push for major reform at the UN, including replacing the HR Commission with a HR council, expanding membership of the Security Council from 15 to 24, making troops serving UN missions accountable for their crimes, redefining terrorism and adopting an agressive nonproliferation system....
George Kennan, one of the architects of “containment” policy during the Cold War, passed away yesterday in Princeton at the age of 101. See the Washington Post story and the NY Times story. Kennan’s writing was erudite, stylish, prolific, and influential; his “Long Telegram” written as a foreign service officer shaped the views of government policymakers on the Soviet Union...
Various blogpundits are warning that China’s new anti secession law is just a prelude to a pending invasion of Taiwan. As a descendant of a Taiwanese mother and Chinese father, with friends and relatives on both sides of the Taiwan Straits, I’ve been worried about such a conflict breaking out for years. On the other hand, since people have been...
I will be accompanying Hofstra's team to Vienna over the next week to compete in the Willem de Vis International Moot Arbitration Competition. This competition is actually a remarkable competition that draws 140 plus teams from around the world. My blogging will therefore be light or perhaps non-existent during that time, but I may break in periodically with dispatches from...
