Kudos to Chris Whytock for a wonderful conference yesterday at UC Irvine addressing the topic of human rights litigation in state courts and under state law. The timing of the conference could not have been better, coming on the heels of the Kiobel oral argument on Tuesday, in which the principal defense of Kathleen Sullivan was that corporations should...
The ABA Journal has a cover story about the threat posed to island states by climate change. This is a topic we have discussed on Opinio Juris at various times. Duncan wrote at length about the Maldives; I had a shorter piece here, and there are various references in the midst of other blog posts. The Journal article is long and...
Here's something you don't see every day: Oxford University is seeking applicants for the Chichele Professorship of Public International Law. Oxford's announcement begins as follows: The Oxford Faculty of Law is a major centre for the study of international law. We aim to build Oxford’s role in the field, as international law becomes increasingly important and complex, and more closely involved with...
[Juan E. Méndez is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and a Professor at American University Washington College of Law.] Torture is illegal and immoral, and like slavery, we should have abolished it by now. And yet its use continues to haunt our societies. In fact, the issue of torture —...
Three quick updates from the "robots and warfare" side of things (largely culled from recent Danger Room posts that caught my eye and I wanted to point out to Opinio Juris readers). I have previously posted about Big Dog, the four-legged beast of burden being developed for use by the U.S. military. DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is now...
My friend Dapo Akande takes me to task today at EJIL: Talk! for my position on drone strikes directed at combatants attending a funeral or helping the wounded. I will address his curious reluctance to address the text of the Rome Statute in Part II of my response; in this post, I want to address his arguments concerning IHL. Here...
That's the conclusion drawn in this blockbuster report -- which, precisely because it is a blockbuster that makes Israel and the MEK's vast number of Democratic and Republican supporters in the U.S. look bad, has been basically ignored in the "liberal" media: Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed,...
As most readers likely know, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism recently released a 22,000 word report documenting the disturbing U.S. practice of using drones to target individuals attending funerals or attempting to provide aid to individuals wounded in previous drone strikes. Here is the report's central conclusion: A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at...
It's rare that I defend the ICTY, but I feel compelled to do so here. As discussed in this blog post by Laurie Blank, a group of experts in military law have released a report attacking the Trial Chamber's judgment in Prosecutor v. Gotovina for allegedly misapplying basic IHL rules regarding targeting. Unfortunately, the report fundamentally misstates what the Trial...
There has been much debate the past couple of days about whether the bomb attacks that have killed at least three Iranian nuclear scientists since 2010 qualify as terrorism. Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum on the left and Andrew Sullivan on the right say "yes"; many of their readers (see Greenwald here) and the editor of Technology Review say "no." ...
I had the good fortune yesterday to spend the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To my great surprise, I experienced my first encounter with treaties as art. A special exhibit on display through March 26, 2012 of the work of Sanja Iveković entitled Sweet Violence focuses on the plight of women in post-Communist...
By Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck* Section 1021 of the NDAA and the Laws of War In our companion post, we explained that section 1021 of the NDAA will not have the dramatic effects that many critics have predicted--in particular, that it will not affect the unresolved question of whether the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) would authorize a...
