Opponents of the soon-to-be-passed Military Commissions Act establishing procedures for interrogating and trying alleged terrorists have charged that the bill would suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus. I think it would be serious thing to suspend the Writ and I am persuaded that my earlier analysis of Congress' power to suspend the Writ was incomplete and possibly wrong. But...
In an issue near and dear to my heart, the Senate continues to demonstrate its willingness to defer to the Executive Branch on questions of when and how federalism should limit U.S. treaty-making. Last week, the Senate gave its advice and consent to the U.N. Corruption Convention. This multilateral treaty, which entered into force generally in...
Today is a significant day for the selection of the next UN Secretary-General. A third straw poll among the Security Council members occurs today. It appears that South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ban Ki-moon is the choice. The New York Times has interviews of most of the candidates here, and a leading blog covering...
[Opinio Juris Note: Thanks to everyone, especially David Moore, for participating in the online workshop this week. Here is David's last post and the last contribution to what has been a very interesting and useful workshop.] Marty is, of course, right that the issue before the Court in Sosa was not whether all CIL qualifies as federal common law or...
What a difference ten years makes. Leaving aside for a moment the doctrinal analysis, there’s a striking contrast in tone in this article as compared to Curt and Jack’s pathbreaking 1997 piece on CIL and federal common law (also published in the Harvard Law Review, a pdf of which you can find here). That article betrayed a discernible...
Thank you, Peggy, and everyone else for the previous post and your kind comments. I owe any takers to a round of Moldovan wine at the next Opinio Juris Happy Hour...
I am delighted to inform our readers that the President of Moldova has bestowed on our own Chris Borgen the Moldovan Medal of Civil Merit — "Meritul Civic". The medal, the highest civilian honor that the government may award, recognizes Chris' outstanding work as principal author of the New York City Bar Association study of the Transnistria separatist crisis...
[Opinio Juris note: We are delighted that Martin Flaherty, Leitner Family Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and a leading scholar in the fields of human rights and foreign relations law, has sent along the following thoughts on the Bradley-Goldsmith-Moore article.] This is a rich and stimulating exchange, and I thank all concerned for their contributions. My general reaction...
The perception that Justice Scalia views the majority’s approach differently than our Article does results, at least in part, from the somewhat complicated relation between two issues that I raised in my initial post: (a) the post-Erie status of CIL in the absence of political branch authorization, and (b) the import of the Alien Tort Statute, in particular whether the...
The comments thus far have been quite interesting and I am very pleased that David Moore and Beth Stephens are participating in this online workshop with us on the forthcoming article by Curtis Bradley, Jack Goldsmith, and David. For the sake of space, I will not discuss my points of agreement with the article and will simply pose a...
Thanks to Beth and Julian for their insightful comments. Let me respond to a few of them. Beth suggests that the “modern position” and “revisionist” categories are exaggerated and simplistic, apparently because she perceives that no CIL qualifies as federal common law under the revisionist view while all CIL qualifies as common law under the modern position view....
I think the beer — more sought after than the Ranfurly Shield — is mine:The last pre-election loophole through which John Bolton's confirmation might have snuck through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was at 2:15 this afternoon at a previously called "business meeting" of the Committee. That meeting has been cancelled — and with it even the dimmest chance of John...
