As Julian has noted (see here and here) a federal district court in Washington D.C. last week has dealt a major blow to claims for damages for alleged torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the importance of the case, I wanted to flesh out the decision a little more and provide my own quick thoughts on the case. ...
I happened to be perusing the Yale Law School calendar looking for a link to this seminar when it hit me: it's non-stop international law at YLS. In the month of March there was a featured extra-curricular lecture, presentation, or event about international or foreign law at YLS every single school day of the month: March 1: Dean...
International law is often critiqued for its culture(s) of exclusion--whether it's the ability of sovereign states to shut out NGOs, the move by NGOs to block out Industry Associations, or, on more personal levels, cliques of "in" international lawyers as opposed to those who don't have the right credentials or connections. My colleague Jeff Dunoff has noted one example...
Nancy Rogers, AALS President and Dean of Ohio State Law School, appears to take the law professor blogging phenomenon seriously. For those, like me, who missed her presidential address at the AALS meeting this January, she focused a large portion of her talk on the challenges and opportunities of "e-scholarship" and blogging. Here is an excerpt: I propose that...
As you may remember, last month Peggy, Duncan, and I attended a conference at Yale Law School on the contributions of the New Haven School to international law. In part this was about the policy-oriented jurisprudence associated with Harold Lasswell, Myres McDougal, and Michael Reisman (among others). In part the conference was about the ideas of transnational legal...
A special thanks to Elizabeth Cassidy of UN Watch for her terrific month-long guest blogging stint at Opinio Juris. It was a first for us: guest blogging by an NGO on the ground at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The highlights of Elizabeth's blogging include an excellent summary of the debate over the Darfur resolution,...
There seems to be some resurgence in efforts to use state pension funds to foreign policy ends. California is looking to divest from companies doing business in Iran, and several states have done so with respect to Sudan (now supported by Mia Farrow and Martin Peretz). Are these measures unconstitutional? In February, a federal district court judge struck...
Jose Alvarez's ASIL presidential address is now up on the Society's website here, along with the companion 50 Ways IL Harms Us. I'd missed that the "smug levels" observation was part of a South Park allusion (see page 5), which may have sent some members running to their teenage grandchildren for guidance (though I have to admit that coming...
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a famously lax enforcer of U.S. immigration laws, has started to use its broad detention powers to pick up suspected human rights abusers or war criminals living in the United States. As the Washington Post reports: Ernesto Guillermo Barreiro seemed to fit in well with his neighbors in Virginia's placid horse country. The...
In what I suspect may be a new format for promoting international law conferences, Widener University's School of Law has put together an hour and a half streaming video with highlights from last year's 2 day conference, Envisioning a More Democratic Global System. The Conference was co-sponsored by the American Society of International Law and the Rockefeller Brothers...
The U.S. and South Korean announced yesterday that they have reached a bilateral free trade agreement - the first of its kind between the U.S. and a major Asian economy. Indeed, in terms of trade volume, "KORUS - FTA" immediately becomes the second most important trade agreement for the U.S. after NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). The text...
Opinio Juris has invited scholars who are experts in international environmental law to give their thoughts in the coming days on the Supreme Court's "global warming" decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. I am not an expert on either standing or environmental law, but I do know a fair bit about administrative law. In that vein, I wanted to...
