Was our very own Kevin Jon Heller, and one of his OJ posts, responsible for causing David Barron and Marty Lederman (widely taken as authors of the Justice Department's OLC opinion on the lawfulness of targeting Anwar Al-Awlaki with lethal force) to rewrite their memorandum? Wells Bennett at Lawfare points to an extraordinary passage appearing in a lengthy story in today's...
I have posted on SSRN my latest article, "Ancillary Discovery to Prove Denial of Justice" just published in the Virginia Journal of International Law. It analyzes Section 1782 discovery proceedings in the context of BIT arbitration and argues that there is now uniform agreement among federal courts that investment arbitration panels are "international tribunals" within the meaning of Section...
Last week, a Ceremonial Grand Council was held on Ihanktonwan homelands (located within the boundaries of the U.S. State of South Dakota) which concluded and negotiated the "International Treaty to Protect the Sacred from Tar Sands Projects". I can't find a specific list of participants, but news reports suggest signatories included representatives from an array of U.S native American Tribes...
The indefatigable Glenn Greenwald has unearthed an even more appalling appropriation of Dr. King by the military -- a Department of Defense news article entitled "King Might Understand Today's Wars, Pentagon Lawyer Says." The lawyer in question is none other than Jeh Johnson, former DoD General Counsel. Here is what he says: In the final year of his life, King became...
I am very rarely rendered speechless, but this appropriation of Martin Luther King by the Air Force Global Strike Command Programming Division (nearly) did the trick: The Department of Defense is a leader in equal opportunity for all patriots seeking to serve this great nation. . . The vigilant warriors in AFGSC understand they are all equal and unified in purpose to...
Okay, I'm exaggerating. But only slightly. As Wells Bennett notes today at Lawfare, Judge Pohl has rejected al-Nashiri's contention that the US and al-Qaeda were not engaged in hostilities (an armed conflict in IHL terms) at the time of the acts alleged in his indictment -- primarily the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 -- thereby depriving the military commission...
Jennifer Daskal (who, I'm delighted to say, has just accepted an offer to join the faculty at my school, Washington College of Law) has an important op-ed in the New York Times today titled, simply, "Don't Close Guantanamo." Many of us know Jen Daskal from her earlier positions in the Obama administration Justice Department and, before that, Human Rights Watch...
A number of commentators have challenged my claim that Articles 11(2) and 12(3) of the Rome Statute would permit Palestine to accept the ICC's jurisdiction retroactively, whether as a member-state or on an ad hoc basis. Here, for example, is what my friend Jennifer Trahan wrote yesterday at IntLawGrrls: Even if an entity becomes a "state," should there be jurisdiction that...
Happy Thanksgiving, the best of the American holidays ...
I have been having an interesting twitter exchange with Ben Wittes about an online "Choose Your Own Adventure" game created by the Truman National Security Project. The game, which is entitled "Tell Me How This Ends," asks you to decide how the President of the United States should respond to news that Iran has accumulated enough enriched uranium to build...
The article, which is available in draft form on SSRN, is entitled "'One Hell of a Killing Machine': Signature Strikes and International Law." It is forthcoming in the Journal of International Criminal Justice as part of a mini-symposium on targeted killing edited by Cornell's Jens Ohlin. Here is the abstract: The vast majority of drone attacks conducted by the U.S. have...
The agonizing close presidential race in the U.S. has made everyone on edge about election day problems at the polls. This may explain why the State of Texas has decided to pick a fight with the election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), threatening to arrest election observers who interfere with the upcoming November 6 elections. Texas...
