President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet, announcing yesterday that he is again urging that the U.S. Senate to give its advice and consent to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. As Duncan noted earlier this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is poised to move on this treaty, which has been awaiting ratification for over...
Excellent news for historians researching the Holocaust: the 11-nation governing body of the International Tracing Service, which oversees a massive archive of Nazi documents in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has voted to begin distributing the documents electronically to member states:The archive contains Nazi records on the arrest, transportation, incarceration, forced labor and deaths of millions of people from the year the...
At the risk of committing the post hoc fallacy, it is interesting to note that less than a week after the ICC issued its first arrest warrants related to the situation in Darfur, Rolls-Royce has announced that it will no longer do business in the Sudan:Rolls, which supplies engines to oil firms in the country, said it would "progressively withdraw"...
Richard Posner has an interesting but unconvincing post asking the question why there have been no violent, disruptive protests against the war in Iraq, as there were in 1968 over the Vietnam War. He suggests that in addition to "[t]he obvious answer that there is no longer a draft", that there are five contributing factors that explain the absence...
There is a thoughtful piece in the New Republic by David Fontana, Alex Massie, and Oliver Kamm on the legacy of Tony Blair. I think it adds some real insights on Blair's contributions that were neglected in my previous post. Here is a key excerpt: What, exactly, is Tony Blair's legacy? With Iraq at the center of the news,...
It’s been a very quiet term for the Senate on treaties. But that may be about to change. The Washington Note is reporting that President Bush will soon publicly announce his support for Senate advice and consent to U.S. accession to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the follow-on Implementation Agreement, which...
That's the bottom-line of thoughtful columns from Stuart Taylor and Karen J. Greenberg. (Hat-tips to Ken Anderson and Diane Amann respectively.) It's a harmless proposition, but it has an almost throw-away feel to it. One couldn't, I don't think, expect anything substantively interesting from such an undertaking. Bipartisan study efforts (calling Lee Hamilton!) seem invariably these...
Here's the press release from Starbucks. Starbucks had opposed Ethiopia's filing for trademark rights to three coffee names — Harar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe — with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In Ethiopia's corner, Arnold & Porter took the matter pro bono (anyone who thinks lawyers have gotten slick should take a look at this youTube item with partner...
A warm welcome to Jacob Cogan and his new blog, International Law Reporter. Cogan—an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and a former colleague of mine at the State Department Legal Adviser’s Office—describes his blog in general terms, covering “scholarship, events, and ideas in international law, international relations, and foreign affairs law.”...
In commemoration of Mother’s Day, I wanted to review a wonderful play I saw in London over the weekend. The play Kindertransport by Diane Samuels personalizes the story of almost ten thousand unaccompanied Jewish children who traveled from Germany to England in 1938. But really the play is about a refugee child and her mother, and the struggle...
The U.S. Trade Representative's Office has released some further details on its agreement with Congress to incorporate international labor standards into future U.S. free-trade agreements. Here are a couple important new institutional innovations. (1) Violations of international and local labor standards will apparently be subject to the same international dispute resolution mechanisms as the rest of the trade agreement. This...
President Bush has always insisted that he only went to war with Iraq as a last resort, in response to Saddam's refusal to disarm:"Of course, I haven’t made up my mind we’re going to war with Iraq." [10/1/02] "You said we’re headed to war in Iraq — I don’t know why you say that. I hope we’re not headed to war...
