Foreign Policy has just published its rankings of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2011. As expected, there were the typical assortment of statesmen, economists and activists. But what really stood out was the continued dominance of old media in the shaping of foreign policy. We may be prone to think of 2011 as the year of...
The Court of Appeal judgment orders the UK government to seek the release of Yunus Rahmatullah, an alleged member of Lashkar-e-Taiba who has been detained at Bagram since 2004, from U.S. custody. What is particularly interesting about the decision is that it directly -- though implicitly -- rejects a little-known memo written by Jack Goldsmith while he was at the...
Ashley Deeks, a fellow at Columbia and a former member of the Office of the Legal Adviser, has posted an essay on SSRN -- forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of International Law -- entitled "Unwilling or Unable: Toward an Normative Framework for Extra-Territorial Self-Defense." Here is the abstract: Non-state actors, including terrorist groups, regularly launch attacks against states, often...
Ah, the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act...
Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkol Karman delivered their Nobel Lectures today in Oslo. It was a great day of celebration for the cause of gender equality and democracy. You should read all three lectures in their entirety to give you the full picture of what transpired. The common theme was the power of...
I'm so saddened to report that Professor David J Bederman has passed away at the age of 50 after a lengthy illness. Emory has a tribute to David here. I still vividly remember my first encounter with David's work when I was a new attorney in the Legal Adviser's Office and read his concise, witty and simply wonderfully written introductory text,...
Well, not really today, but it was about twenty years ago that what we now call (incorrectly, at times) the "frozen conflicts"-- the separatist conflicts in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova-- weren't frozen but were actually brushfire wars before settling into stalemates. Long-time readers of this blog may remember my interest in these conflicts, starting with the ongoing conflict in Moldova...
Suzanne Nossel, who was until recently a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations and is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow for Global Governance at the Council of Foreign Relations, has been named the new Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. (I should note that Suzanne is an old friend.) Here's part of what the Amnesty press release said: Most...
Professor Sean Murphy of GW Law has been elected to the ILC. The press release from GW begins: Today, Professor Sean Murphy was elected by the United Nations General Assembly to the International Law Commission (ILC). The Commission consists of 34 distinguished legal scholars, practitioners, and government officials from around the world who are elected to serve for five-year terms. Created...
Starting this coming Tuesday, Opinio Juris is pleased to host a joint symposium with the Yale Law Journal on a new article by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, Outcasting: Enforcement in Domestic and International Law. Here's the abstract: This Article offers a new way to understand the enforcement of domestic and international law that we call “outcasting.” Unlike the distinctive method...
I am deeply grateful to both my co-bloggers at Opinio Juris and the editors of EJIL: Talk! – particularly my friends Marko Milanovic and Dapo Akande – for this remarkable opportunity to discuss my new book. I look forward to hearing what the impressive, and frankly intimidating, group of commenters have to say about it. I wrote this book for one...
Eric Posner points out the NATO intervention into Libya appeared to violate numerous norms of international law (and maybe domestic U.S law as well). He suggests that it is further evidence that legal norms don't really matter much for international military actions. But if the Libya intervention turns out to be a political and moral victory, it also illustrates once again...
