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...
Last week, while I was participating in a conference, I received an email from Google with a puzzling subject line: "Subpoena Notice from Google (Internal Ref. No. 257121)." I opened the email, assuming that it was some kind of sophisticated phishing attempt. It wasn't. It was Google informing me -- more than a little cryptically -- that Chevron had subpoenaed...
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...
A few weeks ago, I wrote a long post explaining the one way in which the absence of due process in a national prosecution could make a case admissible before the ICC. The post drew a distinction between two different kinds of national prosecutions: (1) one that fails to satisfy international standards of due process; and (2) one that fails...
At risk of dipping back into this touchy subject, there's this interesting development as reported in today's NY Times: Google has blocked the film that has provoked embassy (and now KFC) attacks from youTube sites in Libya and Egypt: Google said it decided to block the video in response to violence that killed four American diplomatic personnel in Libya. The company...
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...
Amidst the memorials to 9/11 yesterday came more tragic news with mob attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the consulate in Benghazi, including the deaths of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. My condolences go out to the victims' families and the U.S. Foreign Service community, the Marines who guard them, as well as the local...
Having followed the terrorism litigation against Iran for years, I was fascinated to read of the recent legislation—Section 502 of the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights--that creates a legislative fix for victims of one particular group of terrorist victims but not thousands of others. The law in question grants plaintiffs/judgment creditors in one and only one case—Peterson...
Just when you thought you've seen everything -- you haven't: According to a statement posted on the website of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Judge El Hadji Malik Sow, a Senegalese jurist who served as alternate judge for Trial Chamber II, has agreed to testify in the wake of the defense appeal. A guilty verdict was handed down against Taylor last...
I had a good day yesterday. I received a package in the mail from Oxford containing copies of my book -- The Oxford Guide to Treaties. It represents the culmination of a three year effort on my part to compile a comprehensive and current guide to treaty law and practice. To do this, I started with a fairly simple premise...
A recent post at Mother Jones mentions my view of UBL's killing and provides Ken's brief thoughts on his death: Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University Washington School of Law, disagrees. "Being wounded does not necessarily render one hors de combat; hors de combat means they’re not actually posing a threat to you," Anderson says, citing moments where wounded...
Of the 1500+ posts I've written for Opinio Juris over the past seven years, none angered my fellow progressives more than the post in which I claimed that the killing of Usama bin Laden was perfectly legal under international law. Here is what I wrote: To begin with, I think the applicable legal regime is international humanitarian law (IHL), not international...
