A couple of weeks ago, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum said he was surprised that Syria has, by all accounts, voluntarily given up its chemical-weapons capability: I don't really have any comment about this, except to express a bit of puzzlement. As near as I can tell, Bashar al-Assad is really and truly sincere about destroying his chemical weapons stocks.1 But why?...
Peggy, Julian, Duncan and I took a stab at a podcast discussion of Tuesday's Supreme Court arguments in Bond v. United States. [audio mp3="https://opiniojuris.org/wp-content/uploads/oj-podcast.mp3"][/audio] You can now find an audio of the argument itself here. Mentioned in the course of the discussion are related posts by David Golove and Michael Ramsey here and here. The Nick Rosencranz Harvard Law Review article that...
[Michael W. Lewis is a Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University. He is a former Navy aviator and Topgun graduate.] Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released reports last week criticizing the use of drones in Yemen and Pakistan. Both reports have significant flaws in the way the factual information was presented and in how they characterize international law and US...
Lots of commentary today here and elsewhere on yesterday's oral arguments in Bond v. United States, with vote-counters quick to predict the Court will retreat from Missouri v. Holland and the question is only how much. I have views on the merits, but, frankly I'm having trouble getting passed the fact that two Supreme Court justices, the Solicitor General, and one of...
[Marty Lederman is an Associate Professor at Georgetown Law School and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010, and an Attorney Advisor in OLC from 1994-2002. Lederman and law professors David Golove and John Mikhail filed an amicus brief in Bond.] Some preliminary reactions that occurred to me as I was listening to the...
Lyle Denniston is first out of the gate with his take on the oral argument in the much-anticipated U.S. Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Bond. His general take: The argument in Bond v. U.S. (docket 12-158) reached the grand constitutional scale that has been its potential all along. At the end of an hour-long hearing, it appeared that the government might just have...
November 5, 2013 is U.S. National Treaty Day. Well, not really, but it might as well be given how much treaties are going to be in the news tomorrow. For starters, the United States Supreme Court hears oral argument in the case of Bond v. United States (for the pleadings, see SCOTUS blog's as-always-excellent round-up). As we've blogged previously (a lot), the case...
In my previous post, I mocked Scotland Yard's assertion that David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald's partner, committed an act of terrorism by transporting documents stolen from the US government by Edward Snowden. Mockery remains the appropriate response, given the vast chasm that separates Miranda's actions from any defensible conception of terrorism -- such as the one I quoted from UN General...
The ICC's Public Affairs Unit has brought to my attention that the Sudan Tribune erroneously reported what Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji said to Ruto concerning his public statements about his case. The unofficial transcript makes clear that although the Judge warned Ruto not to make additional statements, he did not suggest that Ruto would be arrested if he did so: 7 It has...