I would be remiss if I did not mark, here at Opinio Juris, the fifth anniversary of the tragic death of UN diplomat and humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in the terrorist attack on the UN's Baghdad headquarters in 2003 along with many other aid and relief workers. And also - it receives far less attention, alas -...
Greg Fox of Wayne State University Law School has posted a new article on SSRN that examines the proposed US/Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) from a unique angle. Discussions in U.S. academic journals and blogs have tended to focus on the constitutionality under U.S. law of the Administration pursuing the completion of a long-term security arrangement with Iraq under...
Before heading to Bethlehem I spent an hour in the Old City of Jerusalem drinking Turkish coffee at the entrance to the Dome of the Rock as I watched thousands of devout Muslims pour in for afternoon prayers, sajjada in hand. I then exited the Muslim quarter through the Damascus Gate and caught sherut 124 to the security checkpoint....
Today’s discussion of Ben’s book focuses on what kind of detention law we should have going forward. Given that I am in Israel now I thought it might be useful to offer a comparative example. Such a comparison is particularly useful when proposed legislation is under consideration and another country has similar terrorist threats. The Israeli...
As I write, I am sitting on the balcony of the Castle in Karem Maharal, a few miles north of Caesarea and a few miles south of Haifa. I look out over my balcony at the vineyards drinking Tishbi wine, which has been grown here in Zichron Yaakov for decades. To my left the sun is setting over...
Honestly, I thought I had seen it all. I had resigned myself to the traditional media doing everything they could to avoid drawing attention to McCain's inability to keep basic facts about foreign policy straight -- Sunni vs. Shia, Czechoslovakia (four times!), Somalia vs. Sudan, the remarkable Iraq/Pakistan border. But I never expected CBS to actually edit an interview with...
There is one book that I have my classes in international business as well as public international law both read (actually, I read it aloud to them and later give them a pop quiz), If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It is the single finest book on incentives and moral hazard available, I believe: If you give a mouse a cookie,...
The following is a guest post by Aaron Zelinksy, a member of the Yale Law School Class of 2010. Wednesday marked the historic transfer of Israeli and Hezbollah prisoners at the Lebanese border. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, proclaimed that he was “very much encouraged by the exchange of prisoners” and that he hoped it would be...
It makes no sense. Israel has traded five brutal militants for the bodies of two dead soldiers and the assorted body parts of other Israeli soldiers. I am in Israel now teaching with a Whittier/Pepperdine study abroad program and coverage of the prisoner exchange is ubiquitous. I attended a special class session with our students of a presentation by Major Aharon...
I notice that none of us have posted on the Israeli military assault on Gaza. This is not surprising, there is very little useful to say about it, especially from a legal point of view. There is something depressingly predictable about the commentary arising out of Israel's military incursion into Gaza. Critics of Israeli policy in general have denounced the incursion, alleging...
