OK, here’s one to ponder: a Chinese company, Anshe Chung Studios, has just issued a press release concerning its construction of a financial system that world support investment across the boundaries of virtual worlds on the Internet, such as Second Life and Entropia. Here’s how they put it:Anshe Chung Studios is preparing to launch a virtual financial market, financial...
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC Prosecutor, announced today that he is opening a formal investigation into the situation in the Central African Republic. The Prosecutor's decision marks the first time that the Court has investigated a situation in which sexual crimes against women outnumber — and significantly outnumber — killings:The Office has analysed allegations of serious crimes perpetrated in CAR,...
Last week’s report of a major shipwreck treasure recovery had me wondering about what the law is here. From a pretty quick study, it looks like this is mostly CIL, at least as far as sites outside territorial waters and the contiguous zone are concerned (that is, more than 24 miles from shore, as this one apparently is), in...
Former President Carter’s criticism of the Bush Administration is the big news of the weekend. You can listen to the interview here. This is what Carter said in the interview: Carter: “I interrelate my condemnation and criticism of this unnecessary invasion with the ministry of Christ as the Prince of Peace. So that’s what I try...
This from Harvard's Einer Elhauge, guest-blogging over at VC. Elhauge describes his new casebook, Global Antitrust Law & Economics:We put US regulations and cases side by side with the EC regulations and cases that regulate the same conduct on global markets, without suggesting that one of them is more important or necessary to understanding basic antitrust law and that...
A little over a year ago, I noted that a Dutch court had sentenced Frans van Anraat, a chemicals dealer, to 15 years in prison for selling Iraq a key component of the mustard gas that Saddam used against the Kurds during the Anfal campaign. Last week, a Dutch appeals court upheld van Anraat's conviction for complicity in war...
That's my hunch. It looks too much like the 1986 deal, coupling an amnesty with enhanced enforcement, the latter of which of course utterly failed. The deal announced yesterday would make pretty much all undocumented aliens arriving in the US before January 1 eligible for legalized status, under an indefinitely renewable "Z" visa program. That amounts to...
Let's set aside for the moment the issue of whether Paul Wolfowitz's tenure as World Bank President was doomed from the start because of his role as chief architect of the Iraq war, and his apparently single-minded management style. Viewed solely from the perspective of the broad anti-poverty mission of the World Bank and its work in promoting open,...
Marty Lederman has terrific posts here and here on the import of James Comey's riveting testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this week. I link to it here for our non-American readers who might have missed it. (Maddeningly, this profoundly important story has not been afforded the wall-to-wall coverage cable news reserves for Anna Nicole Smith's baby custody...
The Floyd Landis doping arbitration that is being held at Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, California took a bizarre turn yesterday, with allegations of criminal witness tampering by the Landis camp. You can read the summary by ESPN here, from Velonews here, and detailed blog commentary here. As most of our readers know, Floyd Landis is under investigation for doping...
A story that has been getting a bit of play in Europe but not as much on this side of the Atlantic is the dispute over the placement of a war memorial in Estonia. In April the Estonian government removed from its capital a memorial to Soviet soldiers who fought in WW II. Estonia’s ethnic Russian minority—and Russia—were...
We had a ballot question in Philadelphia "urg[ing] the United States to make year 2007 the time to redeploy U.S. troops out of harm's way in Iraq," through the unusual mechanism of an amendment to the city's Home Rule Charter. The measure passed overwhelmingly (122,710 to 49,938). According to the Institute for Policy Studies (which has long promoted...
