The U.N. General Assembly has voted in favor of the Arms Trade Treaty, which would do what exactly? Its proponents say it will create an international mechanism to regulate the international sale of arms and other weapons. Its critics say it will infringe on the individual rights of citizens and nations to buy and possess weapons by requiring member states...
A depressingly large number of U.S. media outlets are covering the Italian Supreme Court's decision to order a new trial in the case against Amanda Knox, the American exchange student charged with murdering her British roommate in Italy. Knox was convicted in trial court, but that conviction was overturned on appeal. I say depressing because this is hardly the most significant...
This week we're hosting a symposium on Economic Foundations of International Law, the new book by Eric Posner and Alan Sykes. Here is the abstract: The ever-increasing exchange of goods and ideas among nations, as well as cross-border pollution, global warming, and international crime, pose urgent questions for international law. Here, two respected scholars provide an intellectual framework for assessing these...
It's always exciting when the media pays attention to expert reports on international law. Unfortunately, the media all too often gets international law wrong -- and recent reporting on the Tallinn Manual on International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare is no exception. There has been a spate of articles in the past couple of days that breathlessly claim the Tallinn Manual...
This week, we are hosting a symposium on Curtis Bradley's new book "International Law in the US Legal System", published last month by Oxford University Press. OUP has kindly agreed to offer Opinio Juris readers a 20% discount, which you can access by clicking on the ad at the right. According to the abstract, the book explores the dynamic intersection between international law...
I'm grateful to Ken, Wells Bennett, and Marcy Wheeler for speculating that my April 2010 blog post on 18 USC 1119, the foreign-murder statute, is the post referred to in today's New York Times article on the behind-the-scenes machinations that culminated in the CIA using a drone to kill Anwar al-Awlaki. I imagine they are correct; the post fits the timeline...
As everyone likely knows by now, Rand Paul has ended his remarkable talking filibuster because Attorney General Holder officially responded "no" to the question "Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?" Is it just me, or does Holder's answer actually raise more questions than it answers? (1)...
I have just posted on SSRN my latest article published in the Ohio State Law Journal. Through the lens of the broken windows theory of community policing, the Article examines the connection between corruption and other social goods in society, as well as the relationship between U.S. enforcement efforts and those of other OECD countries. It is incredible how much empirical...
That may seem like a ridiculous question. After all, Libya is doing everything in its power to prosecute Saif domestically -- and he is facing a variety of charges that carry the death penalty. But consider the text of Art. 17(2), the "unwillingness" prong of the the admissibility test: In order to determine unwillingness in a particular case, the Court shall...
According to the White Paper (p. 6), a US citizen "who is located outside the United States and is an operational leader continually planning attacks against US persons or interests" cannot lawfully be killed unless, inter alia, "an informed, high-level official of the US government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of attack against the United States." Early...
There is much to say about the DoJ White Paper on the targeted killing of US citizens, which reflects the US's idiosyncratic interpretation of international law. In this post I want to focus on the White Paper's primary -- and in my view fatal -- flaw: its complete failure to address the relationship between the organized armed groups that it...
We know what is stake at in Libya's admissibility challenge regarding Saif Gaddafi: either a fair trial at the ICC that will likely result in a lengthy prison sentence or an unfair trial in Libya that will almost certainly result in execution. Libya has done nothing to disguise the unfairness of its national proceedings, but it has generally pretended to...
