[William S. Dodge is The Honorable Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. From August 2011 to July 2012, he served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on the amicus brief of the United States to the Fourth Circuit...
At Just Security, my friend Ryan Goodman has posted a long analysis of Serdar Mohammed v. Ministry of Defense, in which the UK High Court held that IHL neither authorizes nor regulates detention in non-international armed conflict (NIAC). That decision will soon be considered by the Court of Appeal. In his post, which is a must-read, Ryan states that he agrees with the High Court...
The Washington Post has a long article today about how Mossad and the CIA collaborated to blow up Hezbollah's chief of international operations in 2008. Here are the key paragraphs: On Feb. 12, 2008, Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, walked on a quiet nighttime street in Damascus after dinner at a nearby restaurant. Not far away, a team of CIA spotters in the...
[Nimrod Karin is a J.S.D. candidate at New York University School of Law. From 2006 to 2012 he served as a legal adviser to the Israel Defense Forces at the International Law Department of the Military Advocate General’s Corps’ HQ, and from 2012 to 2013 he was the Deputy Legal Adviser to Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations.] Thanks so much...
Just Security has published two long guest posts (here and here) on the ICC and Palestine by Nimrod Karin, a J.S.D. candidate at New York University School of Law who was previously Deputy Legal Adviser to Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations. There is much to respect about the posts, which are careful, substantive, and avoid needless hyperbole. And I agree...
The fight between President Obama and Congress over Cuba policy is nothing compared the brewing struggle over a U.S.-Iran agreement over Iran's nuclear program. I noticed this little foreign affairs law nugget today from the WSJ's report of this ongoing struggle (emphasis added): In the Senate, Mr. Menendez, of New Jersey, is co-author of a bill that seeks to impose new,...
John Boehner has invited Bibi Netanyahu to address Congress. There's a modern tradition of foreign leaders appearing before the legislature (list here). I'm willing to bet that every single one of those appearances was pre-cleared with the State Department or White House in advance. I'm no student of Middle East politics, but it's seems pretty clear that the the White House...
It looks like a big showdown is brewing between the President and Congress over Cuba policy (Here comes 2016 presidential candidate Rubio!). Some legal commentators have argued, however, that President Obama already has the legal authority to lift all or most of the Cuba embargo without any further action by Congress. Robert Muse, a lawyer whose practice is all about Cuba sanctions...
[Harlan Cohen is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law] This past November, the University of Georgia School of Law and the ASIL International Legal Theory Interest Group convened a book workshop on “International Law as Behavior,” at Tillar House, ASIL’s headquarters in Washington, DC. The workshop brought together scholars working in variety of different...
In a comment to a recent post, Patrick O’Donnell noted a post from the first year of Opinio Juris in which I had taken a crack at starting a list of the “must reads “of international law. I wanted to get a discussion going over what should be the key scholarly texts in our field. Opinio Juris readers made significant...
One of my first posts with Opinio Juris remains one of my all time favorites -- Strawberries versus Skin Cancer. Looking back, that post marked a transition point for me as a scholar and an academic; in it, I began to allow myself to think more critically about my former employer, the U.S. State Department, even as I remained loyal to...
I want to mark our Opinio Juris anniversary with some musings on how the legal blogosphere has changed in the decade since Chris, Peggy, and I launched this site. When we began, there was already a pretty robust universe of legal blogs. But law blogs were still pretty much hobbies rather than serious professional publications. Chris, Peggy and I were writing for each...
