Yesterday I attended a wonderful conference on religious asylum. I was particularly impressed by the work of one of the speakers, Paul Marshall. He offered a tremendously impressive survey of religious oppression throughout the world. The bottom line is religious freedom is strongest in countries with majority Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist populations and the weakest in countries with majority...
ASIL president Jose Alvarez has dedicated his monthly presidential column to the "revolution from below" that is radically transforming the "invisible college" of international lawyers. As Alvarez notes, the term "invisible college" was coined in 1977 by the late Oscar Schachter to describe "the 'professional community' of professors, students, government officials and international civil servants was capable, through 'heterogenenity...
Steve Bainbridge has an interesting post suggesting that Professor Mary Ann Glendon's nomination to the Holy See raises a conflict of interest: Now let’s be clear about something. I am a great admirer of Prof. Glendon. I had to good fortune to meet her back in 2000 and she was delightful. She’s also a brilliant scholar and a very significant public...
It may seem relatively obvious why duties owed by individuals to the state, of the type that were proposed for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are problematic: they can be used by states to limit its duties to individuals and thus limit the scope of their human rights. But what about the duties each of us owe to...
Wow! Like Marty Lederman, I really thought this story was from The Onion. But, it now appears that the Acting Head of OLC, Dan Levin, volunteered to undergo waterboarding in an effort to inform his legal opinion as to what qualifies as “torture.” On the one hand, I think this is another useful reminder that many who’ve...
Pakistan watcher Paula Newberg’s early assessment is at Huffpo. Her scorecard: Musharraf 5; rule of law, 0. (Can we expect global reaction to this martial law to be a bit different from the old martial laws in light of YouTube and real-time blogging? Or does the nuclear option cancel out the outrage?) Scott Horton’s take at his...
I recently finished teaching Hartford Fire again. And it got me pondering Justice Scalia’s curious attitudes towards international and foreign law. Scalia’s hostility to the use of foreign legal norms in interpreting the U.S. Constitution is well-established. As far back as Thompson v. Oklahoma in 1988 we see Scalia critique "The plurality's reliance upon Amnesty International's account of...
Many people don’t realize how close the modern law of human rights came to becoming a law of human rights and human duties. The first article of the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, prepared by former McGill law professor John Humphrey, first director of the UN Human Rights Division, stated: “Everyone owes a duty to...
The Pew Research Center has just published a wonderful survey on rising contentment in the developing world. According to the survey those surveyed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are more satisfied with the state of the nation than those surveyed in Europe and the United States. "Throughout much of the world, rising incomes are improving national conditions...
Two weeks ago I had the good fortune to moderate a panel at the International Law Weekend that included Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the D.C. Circuit. I thought his comments deserved wider dissemination. The focus of the panel was a review of the influence and relevance of the legal academy. It included great speakers such as Martin Flaherty of...
I will be giving a public lecture next Tuesday, November 13th, at the London School of Economics. The lecture, which is sponsored by LSE's International Humanitarian Law Project and the Law Society Charity, will ask whether the Iraqi High Tribunal should serve as a model for what scholars have called "internationalized domestic tribunals": domestic courts that directly apply international...
It's bad enough that the Mafia's criminal activity accounts for 7% of Italy's gross domestic product. Even worse is that at least one major Mafia clan has discovered a new product to traffic — nuclear material:Authorities in Italy are investigating a mafia clan accused of trafficking nuclear waste and trying to make plutonium. The 'Ndrangheta mafia, which gained notoriety in...
