In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

17 Jul

That's the question asked by the blog of Oxford University Press. All of the short answers, provided by scholars ranging from Ruti Teitel to Bill Schabas, are worth a read. Here's mine: In my view, it is time to begin to question whether the International Criminal Court will ever play a major role in the fight against impunity. This is not...

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16 Jul

There are many dads who have played make-believe with their little girls, perhaps taking the part of kindly king to his daughter's princess.  Not many people have turned this game into an international legal incident concerning state formation.  But  at least one man has. According to the Washington Post:
Jeremiah Heaton was playing with his daughter in their Abingdon, Va., home last winter when she asked whether she could be a real princess. Heaton, a father of three who works in the mining industry, didn’t want to make any false promises to Emily, then 6, who was “big on being a princess.” But he still said yes. “As a parent you sometimes go down paths you never thought you would,” Heaton said. Within months, Heaton was journeying through the desolate southern stretches of Egypt and into an unclaimed 800-square-mile patch of arid desert. There, on June 16 — Emily’s seventh birthday — he planted a blue flag with four stars and a crown on a rocky hill. The area, a sandy expanse sitting along the Sudanese border, morphed from what locals call Bir Tawil into what Heaton and his family call the “Kingdom of North Sudan.” There, Heaton is the self-described king and Emily is his princess.
Wow. Heaton just upped the ante for all non-royal dads. The Washington Post also reports:
Heaton says his claim over Bir Tawil is legitimate. He argues that planting the flag — which his children designed — is exactly how several other countries, including what became the United States, were historically claimed. The key difference, Heaton said, is that those historical cases of imperialism were acts of war while his was an act of love. “I founded the nation in love for my daughter,” Heaton said.
That’s sweet. Really. But let’s turn to the international legal argument…
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16 Jul

[Zachary Clopton is the Public Law Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.] For decades, scholars and practitioners of international law in the United States have focused on the federal courts.  The combination of diversity, alienage, federal question, and Alien Tort Statute (ATS) jurisdiction largely justified this focus.  But in the wake of decisions such as Morrison and Kiobel, some of these scholars and practitioners have turned to state courts and state law to vindicate international norms (1, 2).  To give one example, New York state courts are adjudicating foreign-law claims against the Bank of China arising from its alleged facilitation of Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad attacks in Israel. The attention to states may prove to be a positive development, but notably it has tended to rely on judicially created rights—common law claims under state or foreign law, or customary international law.  What about state political branches?  Is there is a role for governors and state legislatures, and should internationalists spend some of their energy lobbying these state-level political actors? From a policy perspective, as well as from a doctrinal and constitutional one, international litigation in U.S. courts raises both horizontal (separation of powers) and vertical (federalism) questions.  Although some judges and scholars object to international law in all of its forms, and others applaud any expanded role for international law, acknowledging the independent horizontal and vertical dimensions opens up more nuanced options.
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16 Jul

Last year's inaugural Emerging Voices symposium was a big success, so today we’re kicking off our second annual edition. Through mid-August, we will be bringing you a wide variety of posts written by graduate students, early-career practitioners and academics. Tune in over the next several weeks if you'd like to read more about litigation of international law in domestic courts, interstate arbitration, statelessness, and rape as a war crime--to...

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14 Jul

Professor Yann-huei Song of the Academia Sinica here in Taipei has notified me of the recent passing of his friend and fellow Law of the Sea scholar William T. Burke of the University of Washington.  His Seattle Times obituary is here.  Professor Burke's academic publications included The Public Order of the Oceans (coauthored with Myres S. McDougal), published in 1962 and revised...

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14 Jul

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa In Nigeria, Boko Haram-style violence radiates southwards. Ebola continues to spread in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, with a combined 44 new cases and 21 deaths between July 6 and 8, the World Health Organisation has said. Asia North Korea has fired artillery shells into waters near its sea border with South Korea,...

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13 Jul

Harry J. Kazianis, the managing editor of The National Interest, has a smart post discussing the risk that the U.S. is taking if it tries to take more aggressive action to counter China in the South China Sea.  Essentially, he argues the U.S. has no effective strategy to counter China's "non-kinetic" strategy to subtly alter the status quo by using...

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13 Jul

Calls for papers Yale Law School is hosting its 4th Doctoral Scholarship Conference on November 14-15, 2014. The theme for this year’s conference is ‘law and responsibility’. The conference is open to current doctoral candidates, both in law and law-related disciplines, and those who graduated during the previous academic year. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is August 1, 2014. More...

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12 Jul

This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a symposium on Ian Henderson and Bryan Cavanagh's paper on Military Members Claiming Self-Defence during Armed Conflict. In a first post, Ian and Bryan discussed when self-defence applies during an armed conflict, while their second post dealt with collateral damage and "precautions in attack". Their third post addressed prohibited weapons, obedience to lawful commands, and a ‘duty’...

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11 Jul

[Kinga Tibori-Szabó currently works for the Legal Representative of Victims at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. She is also a New York attorney. In 2012, she won the ASIL Lieber Prize for her book Anticipatory Action in Self-Defence.] What could be more straightforward than a unit commander’s right to defend his unit, or other specified units against hostile acts and hostile intent?...

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11 Jul

[Ian Henderson is a group captain in the Royal Australian Air Force and is currently posted as the Director Military Law Centre and Deputy-Director Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law. Bryan Cavanagh is a squadron leader in the Royal Australian Air Force and is currently posted as a legal training officer at the Military Law Centre and Asia-Pacific Centre for Military...

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