I'm sure Kevin will have more to say about this, but it is worth noting that Augusto Pinochet, former Chilean dictator and the target of many international prosecution efforts for his actions as Chilean dictator, passed away yesterday. Pinochet may indeed face punishment for his crimes, but it won't be at the hands of international or domestic courts. ...
Kofi Annan gave his final public speech today as UN Secretary General. He chose to give it in a place full of historical resonances: Independence, Missouri, the birthplace of Harry Truman, the American President most associated with the UN. In part, this may be viewed as a rebuke to President George W. Bush, who has been the sharpest...
Several OJ contributors (Peter, Duncan, Julian and Roger) are in San Diego today as part of an ASIL Interest Group meeting. Right now we are discussing with John McGinnis and a couple dozen other prominent internatioal law scholars this provocative article by John McGinnis and Ilya Somin, in which they argue that customary international law is fundamentally defective because...
Bill Dodge has an interesting piece on customary international law and Sosa that was recently published on SSRN. It is worth a read, particularly in light of our online workshop on the piece by Jack Goldsmith, Curtis Bradley, and David Moore. Here is Dodge's abstract: This paper explores the role of customary international law in the U.S. legal system...
Jeane Kirkpatrick died yesterday. Here is the New York Times obituary. And here is an excerpt from her 1979 article, Dictatorships and Double Standards, in Commentary that launched her political career: Fulfilling the duties and discharging the functions of representative government make heavy demands on leaders and citizens, demands for participation and restraint, for consensus and compromise. It is...
Blood Diamond, which opens nationwide today, sounds like a dreadful movie, as movies whose central message is unsubtle social commentary so often are. But for obvious reasons it's provoking a lot of interest in the role that the diamond trade has played in African civil conflict. You can find a good update of the conflict diamonds situation here,...
A very prominent scholar requesting anonymity emailed me to challenge my post yesterday regarding Second Life. He writes, I am surprised that you of all people, with your knowledge of arbitration, think that second world is lawless. For two reasons it is not remotely lawless. First, it has elaborate choice of law and choice of forum provisions. ...
As readers of this blog may know, I was not a huge fan of the Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and I more or less welcomed Congress' decision to reverse much of the result of that decision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. But the Hamdan decision could still retain larger significance despite Congress' action....
In the past week or so Julian and Duncan have had interesting posts about applying laws to terra nullius and moon stations. (See here and here). But there is yet another world in which we are in unchartered waters headed to virgin territory: the virtual world. By now we have long wrestled with electronic commerce and...
Speaking of current Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, check out his new "bobblehead" doll being offered by Yale Law's American Constitution Society for only $26.00 (not including shipping). ...
About half of the names on a list of 30 nominees passed along to the Harvard Board of Overseers have now been leaked (see here and here). Among them: Anne-Marie Slaughter (who will be known to most of our readers) and Jessica Tuchman Mathews (who has headed up the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 1997 and is very...
I am just now beginning to make my way through the Iraq Study Group report issued today. I wanted to raise one small but interesting issue relating to Justice O'Connor's service on the study group. We all know various historical examples in which a sitting or former justice served an important political function (John Jay, Robert Jackson, Earl...
