Let's just say international law was not a fulcrum in last night's debate. It's not like the topic was being discriminated against -- many important topics were ignored. (Among them the Eurozone crisis, climate change, cyberwar, NATO, anything much of Asia beyond China, Mexico or Canada.) Bob Scheiffer asked a question about drones, which Romney answered by agreeing with the...
Iran has said it may stop oil production if Western sanctions tighten. The United Kingdom will double the number of drones it has in Afghanistan for combat and surveillance missions. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany could take part in assisting a European mission to Mali that would train troops to fight Islamist insurgents in the north of the country. Former US...
Children and armed conflict or “CAAC” (as the unharmonious acronym goes), has become a controversial area of activity for the UN Security Council. Although the Security Council has adopted a series of important resolutions on the topic since 2005, its most recent foray into the fray led to four abstentions to Resolution 2068. Azerbaijan, China, Pakistan and Russia declined to support...
Kevin and I have still never met in person, but we've already had our first twitter encounter last week on the legality of a U.S. military response to the attacks that killed the U.S. Ambassador in Libya (as well as three other Americans). Although the news reports on the attacks are not exactly clear, some have suggested that there is...
With all the 50th anniversary retrospectives, seems like a good time to revisit Abram Chayes' foreign relations law classic, The Cuban Missile Crisis: International Crises and the Role of Law. Chayes was the State Department Legal Adviser in October 1962, on leave from Harvard Law School; though Chayes was a participant in deliberations around the crisis, the book wears its...
I am delighted to announce that Oxford University Press has just published a paperback edition of my book, The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. The paperback is priced at a very reasonable £25 -- £45 cheaper than the hardback. Here again is the description: This book provides the first comprehensive legal analysis of the twelve war...
Violence erupted in Beirut after the funeral of the slain intelligence chief, raising fears that Lebanon will be unable to escape the tensions in Syria. Foreign Policy has more here. In Syria itself, violence continues, and Special Envoy Brahimi has once again called for a ceasefire over the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha starting this Thursday. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has told the special envoy...
On November 1, 2012 at 4pm, the Columbia Law School Center for Constitutional Governance and the American Society of International Law are organizing a Panel Discussion on International Law and the South China Sea. Speakers are Henry S. Bensurto, Sir Daniel Bethlehem, KCMG QC, Harold Hongju Koh and Coalter G. Lathrop. Professor Bernard Oxman will moderate. On December 4-5, 2012, Human Rights First will...
I want to call readers' attention to an excellent new article by James Stewart (UBC; currently a Global Hauser Fellow at NYU) that is forthcoming in the Journal of International Criminal Justice. Here is the abstract of the article, entitled "Overdetermined Atrocities": An event is overdetermined if there are multiple sufficient causes for its occurrence. A firing squad is a classic...
This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a book discussion on Informal International Lawmaking, a new volume edited by Joost Pauwelyn, Ramses Wessel and Jan Wouters, hot of the presses from OUP. In a post on the conceptual approaches adopted by the authors, Joost Pauwelyn explained what they mean by "informal" international lawmaking and what the book hopes to add to the debate on non-traditional forms...
Earlier this week, Harold Koh gave a speech. And it wasn't about conflicts, drones, or cyberwar, topics that have dominated the attention of international lawyers in recent years. Rather, Koh's speech was a meditation on the processes of international law-making that confront the State Department on a daily basis. It was, simply put, a survey of the current international legal landscape...
We are happy to announce that this Monday Professor Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School will join Opinio Juris as our newest member. Kristen’s articles range across a variety of topics in international law and, in particular, she has become a respected scholar regarding questions of the responsibility of international organizations and of states. She also writes...
