Sarah Palin in last night's debate: America is in a position to help. What I've done in my position to help, as the governor of a state that's pretty rich in natural resources, we have a $40 billion investment fund, a savings fund called the Alaska Permanent Fund. When I and others in the legislature found out we had some millions of dollars...
I think it’s over. As is true with notational wars, it takes another, more serious threat to take care of the displacement. The end isn’t in the way of armistice or surrender. The wars on drugs and crime continue to be fought under more prosaic headings, but they no longer have a hold on the national imagination. And in the...
Thou shalt not incite public curiosity. It is perhaps the most curious of international obligations. But there it is, expressly required in the Geneva Conventions: prisoners of war "shall be protected ...
The following post was written by Chimène Keitner, an Associate Professor at Hastings. Our thanks to her for contributing it. The Ninth Circuit issued a panel opinion this week in Abagninin v. AMVAC Chemical Corp., a corporate Alien Tort Statute (ATS) case that had largely been flying under the radar screen of many of us who follow these cases, myself included....
The Seventh Circuit in Osagiede v. United States earlier this month ruled that an attorney's failure to provide information as to the client's Vienna Convention rights may constitute ineffective assistance of counsel. Effective performance by counsel representing a foreign national in a criminal proceeding is reasonable performance “under prevailing professional norms.” ...
I hope readers will forgive me for arrogating the "Featured Post" section of the blog, but I wanted to report some professional news: I have accepted a Senior Lecturer position at the University of Melbourne School of Law. I begin next semester -- March, 2009. I will greatly miss the University of Auckland. It's a wonderful law school, with excellent students...
We've spent a lot of time here at Opinio Juris on the implications of the Supreme Court's Medellin decision. Very little of that discussion, however, has considered the decision's impact on the Senate's role in U.S. treaty-making. That may be because the Court itself spent so little time on the Senate. It did recognize that the intent of the Senate,...
A couple of years ago, I examined whether popular conceptions of the current Bush Administration's disdain for treaties had quantitative support. I found to my surprise that the Bush Administration did not appear to be concluding significantly fewer treaties (whether solely pursuant to Article II or to all forms of U.S. agreement-making combined). Looking just at Article II treaty activity in...
This past month I received an email sent to over 60 law professors inviting us to join an amicus brief. The case is before the D.C. Circuit and involves the important issue of corporate responsibility for human rights violations under international law. The email was sent at approximately midnight on a Monday night and invited a distinguished group...
Two months ago, I predicted that the Security Council would not have the votes necessary to defer the ICC's prosecution of Bashir. Nostradamus I'm not: In a last-ditch attempt to prevent ICC judges from issuing an arrest warrant for Bashir in the next few weeks, Bashir's supporters - the Arab League, the African Union, China and Russia - will use the...
I had the pleasure this past Friday to moderate a conference at Pepperdine on social entrepreneurship that featured Matt Flannery, co-founder of Kiva, one of the leading microfinance organizations on the Internet. There is so much I could say about Kiva and Flannery's remarks, but let me just highlight a few points that were raised by his discussion. First, the...
In my original post, I recommended a number steps that Israel should take in order to contain the increasing terror activities emerging from East Jerusalem. I would like now to illuminate some of these. As noted in the original post, during the last seven years, the levels of terror activity in East Jerusalem have been significantly lower than those in the...
