In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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01 Nov

I blogged late last year about the UK Court of Appeal's judgment in Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs v. Rahmatullah, which implicitly repudiated a little-known OLC memo written by Jack Goldsmith that concluded “operatives of international terrorist organizations” are not “protected persons” for purposes of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention -- a provision that prohibits...

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30 Oct

The article, which is available in draft form on SSRN, is entitled "'One Hell of a Killing Machine': Signature Strikes and International Law."  It is forthcoming in the Journal of International Criminal Justice as part of a mini-symposium on targeted killing edited by Cornell's Jens Ohlin.  Here is the abstract: The vast majority of drone attacks conducted by the U.S. have...

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23 Oct

I've long wondered whether and when the American Law Institute (ALI) might try to update its 3rd Restatement on the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.  Since its 1987 publication, the two-volume set, culled together under the leadership of Professor Lou Henkin, has had a tremendous impact.  It has been a frequent resource for U.S. courts and American international...

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19 Oct

We are happy to announce that this Monday Professor Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School will join Opinio Juris as our newest member. Kristen’s articles range across a variety of topics in international law and, in particular, she has become a respected scholar regarding questions of the responsibility of international organizations and of states. She also writes...

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17 Oct

Jack Goldsmith offers five thoughts today at Lawfare about the D.C. Circuit's Hamdan II decision.  I agree with two of his thoughts -- that the government is free to rely in future prosecutions on alternatives to material support (MST) such as aiding and abetting terrorism, and that (sadly)  al-Bahlul could be detained indefinitely if he is ultimately acquitted by his...

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16 Oct

Over the next three days we are bringing you a discussion of a brand new book, edited by Joost Pauwelyn (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva), Ramses Wessel (University of Twente, The Netherlands) and Jan Wouters (University of Leuven, Belgium), on Informal International Lawmaking, published by Oxford University Press. Here is the abstract provided by the publisher: Many international...

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09 Oct

I want to briefly interrupt the LJIL symposium to flag the fact that the Bond case is back on the U.S. Supreme Court's radar screen and with it the prospect that the Court may revisit one of the most canonical cases of U.S. foreign relations law: Missouri v. Holland. The facts are a bit lurid -- Carol Anne Bond discovered that her husband had...

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19 Sep

Yesterday, Harold Koh, the Legal Adviser of the U.S. State Department, spoke at the U.S. Cyber Command Inter-Agency Legal Conference on the applicability of international law to cyberspace and, particularly, cyberwar/ cyberconflict. For a couple of takes on the speech, see the Washington Post here and Defense News, here. In our ongoing efforts to make full-text presentations of international...

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12 Sep

The deplorable killing of Chris Stevens in Libya suggests a foreign relations law rationale for banning hate speech. Remember, the Benghazi protests were prompted by this film depicting the prophet Mohammed in not very flattering terms. The equation from the protesters at the US consulate in Benghazi: this film was produced by an American; we will hold America responsible for it. The...

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