During the 1790s, the Supreme Court decided numerous cases involving Article 17 of the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France. These cases all arose in the context of an ongoing naval war that pitted France against England and Spain. France commissioned several privateers to attack British and Spanish merchant ships. The French privateers brought captured...
As I pointed out last week, there was an odd disconnect between the International Court of Justice's finding that Serbia did not commit genocide against Bosnia and judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia finding responsibility for genocide at the highest levels of the Serbia/Yugoslavia government. The IWPR, which has great coverage of this issue, further...
As covered last week in Chris Borgen’s post titled, Conference on the "New" New Haven School, the Yale Journal of International Law (YJIL) is pleased to announce its fifth annual Young Scholars Conference, which will take place this Saturday, March 10, at YLS. The Conference's theme is "The 'New' New Haven School: International Law: Past, Present & Future." A generation...
The Tenth Circuit last week rendered a nice little opinion addressing the relationship between terrorism, free speech, and security zones at inter-governmental conferences. The gist of the argument in Citizens for Peace in Space v. City of Colorado Springs is that free speech rights diminish as government interests in security are heightened. Translation: protesters' rights are going...
In Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, the Supreme Court engaged in a practice that, sadly, is becoming increasingly common in cases where an individual litigant raises a claim or defense on the basis of a treaty. The Court ignored the relevant constitutional text. Despite the fact that the text of the Supremacy Clause explicitly addresses a central issue in the...
I just published at Huffington Post my last post on the UCLA nuclear threats conference entitled, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Preemptive Strikes. Here is an excerpt: [T]here were a few who did suggest the appropriateness of preemptive strikes. Berkeley political scientist Bob Powell said that defense and deterrence were synonymous and that the real question...
It's not international law, strictly speaking, but I rarely get to defend Bush's executive power so I'm making an exception. A very prominent liberal blogger suggested today that Bush would violate the Rules Governing Petitions for Executive Clemency if he pardoned Scooter Libby anytime soon:[Y]esterday, when Tony Snow was asked about the possibility, he refused to rule a pardon...
Please join me in welcoming ITER (Latin for “the way”) as the likely newest entrant to the roster of international organizations (IOs). Signed in Paris on November 21 of last year, ITER is the creation of EURATOM, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Russian and the United States. Its mission gives reality to what had previously been thought of...
[Chris Whytock is a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University and will join the faculty of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law in the fall. He has kindly agreed to lend his timely analysis of the Sinochem opinion to Opinio Juris readers] On March 5, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court announced one of its rare decisions on the doctrine...
Jean Baudrillard, the great postmodern philosopher who once described the U.S. as "the only remaining primitive society," died yesterday at age 77. Here is a snippet of his obituary in the New York Times:The author of more than 50 books and an accomplished photographer, Mr. Baudrillard ranged across different subjects, from race and gender to literature and art to...
I am blogging the UCLA nuclear threat conference over at Huffington Post. My first post on former Defense Secretary William Perry's keynote address last night is available here. Here is an excerpt: My impression after hearing Perry speak is that we must calculate the awful new arithmetic of the atomic bomb. The nuclear risk we face today is the...
When two keen observers cross the divide to agree on some basic propositions regarding anti-terrorism policies, we ought to pay attention. Ken Anderson and Elisa Massimino have this think piece out from the Stanley Foundation. (Ken will be known to readers of the blog and Elisa should be -- she heads up the Washington office of Human Rights...
