With the Supreme Court term now complete, I thought it would be useful to give a brief year-end review of the Court's decisions. The Supreme Court produced no blockbuster cases this year on any subject related to our discipline. It was truly a sleeper year. There were three cases addressing immunity; two cases addressing asylum, one case...
Events in Honduras occurred while I was in a plane on a long flight, so I do not have enough of a grasp of what the facts are, or appear to be, to offer an opinion. However, I wanted to note that, whatever they are exactly, they seem to have touched off an interesting, and not inconsequential debate, over what...
Update, July 3, 2009. The Economist of July 4, 2009 has a useful, short article on the EU's proposals for reforming global finance, "Divided by a Common Market." I will put up a separate post with some excerpts from the piece.) I spent the plane flights back and forth to Prague over the weekend mostly reading, uninterrupted and straight through, the...
The New York Times (along with much of the mainstream media) has "rediscovered" cyberwar of late (see here, here, here, and here). Today's story revives longstanding differences between Russian government proposals to regulate cyberwarfare by treaty versus existing U.S. preferences to place the issue in more informal law enforcement cooperation networks: Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for...
(Note from Ken: OJ has been very pleased to have Amos Guiora guest-blogging with us last week, offering a series of posts on the question of administrative detention in Israel, and how its legal and security system address the many complex questions raised. I raised to Amos a question about the role of the judiciary in Israel in counterterrorism operations,...
In various posts on OJ about Predator drones, targeted killing, and such topics, I've made reference to a book chapter I've been drafting for Benjamin Wittes's forthcoming edited volume of policy essays, Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform (Brookings Institution Press 2009). I'm pleased to say that my chapter, Targeted Killing in US Counterterrorism Strategy and Law,...
Last month, the Obama Administration informed the Senate of its treaty priorities via a letter from the State Department (you can access it here). The letter lists 17 treaties for which the Administration seeks Senate advice and consent "at this time," including (as predicted here and here) CTBT, CEDAW, and UNCLOS. It also lists 12 treaties "on which...
Karen DeYoung has a very interesting account of the on-going Predator drone campaign in Pakistan, on the front page of the Monday, June 1, 2009 Washington Post, "Al Qaeda Seen as Shaken in Pakistan." The story is sourced to US intelligence and military officials, as well as some Pakistani officials, and recounts how the Pakistani army's campaign to retake the Swat...
Jack Goldsmith observes in a Washington Post op-ed that when one avenue of national security closes, another is opened up, sometimes with worse collateral consequences for third parties. As he says: Demands to raise legal standards for terrorist suspects in one arena often lead to compensating tactics in another arena that leave suspects (and, sometimes, innocent civilians) worse off. I think this...
Former State Department Legal Advisor John Bellinger, who is now at Arnold & Porter and also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has an interesting op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. The U.S. government can and should be a strong voice for redress of human-rights abuses around the world. But these lawsuits, which are being brought under...
Today's New York Times leads with the story of Pentagon plans to form a new cybercommand: The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare. The military command would complement a civilian effort to be announced by President Obama on...
Deniz Aydiner wins the honors for one of the dumbest murderers ever. He was indicted for aggravated murder in 2003 and while the investigation was pending he returned to Turkey. The state of Oregon subsequently indicted him and sought to impose the death penalty. But Aydiner missed his wife so much that he just had to return...
