My long slow slide into complete disenchantment with the Obama administration continues. Comes now, via my two favorite national-security law bloggers, Glenn Greewald and Scott Horton, a truly terrifying tale in which a nameless and faceless Department of Defense committee attempts to put Clive Stafford Smith, one of the world's great human-rights lawyers, in jail for...
Over at Volokh, Eric Posner has a very interesting post today on the Koh nomination. Here is a snippet: Foreign-law opponents, take heart! Koh is not a cosmopolitan who seeks to sacrifice American sovereignty to foreign gods. He is a liberal who wants to move American law to the left. International law serves as a handy vehicle, to be used or...
The more things change, the more things stay the same -- at least with this administration: He had become the most vocal opponent of the trial of Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr, taking on a position more akin to politician than lawyer and launching a two-year public and media campaign that landed him on the front pages of newspapers and inside...
Tod Lindberg, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and editor of Policy Review (and, full disclosure, good friend of mine) has a new article out in Commentary, "The Only Way to Prevent Genocide." The article argues that while "creative diplomacy" can make a difference, in "the end, it may all come down to the willingness of the United States to...
Back in February, I noted that the ASIL Task Force on U.S. Policy Toward the International Criminal Court had adopted a set of recommendations for how the Obama Administration could take steps to engage with the ICC in new, more positive ways than the preceding Bush Administration. As part of the ASIL Conference last week, the Task Force released a...
Rwandan President Paul Kagame is personally invested in making Rwanda a country that is committed to reconciliation, human rights and self-sufficiency. Toward that end, Kagame is seeking to mobilize the most powerful social force in his country—Rwandan pastors—to protect human rights and pursue forgiveness in a country that has much to forgive. In 2005 Kagame partnered with...
(Welcome Instapundit readers, and thanks Glenn for the Instalanche! Since you are likely already aware of the Freeman email, the discussion of a 'new liberal realism' is in the second half of the post.) OJ readers being very alert to the latest happenings in international politics, I imagine that folks are aware that Chas Freeman has withdrawn from consideration for a...
Two genocide bloggers at Change.org, Michelle F. and Michael Bear Kleinman, have been engaged for the past couple of weeks in an impassioned debate over the ICC's arrest warrant for Bashir. (See here and here, for the most recent installments.) Michelle, though certainly not unaware of its dangers, supports the warrant. Kleinman opposes it, blaming the ICC -- like many...
Stephen Cave has a very nice short essay at the Financial Times, reviewing three books on battlefield robotics ("The New War Machine," March 7, 2009), including a discussion of PW Singer's new book, Wired for War. Talon is a robot. He is the future of warfare and, with more than 12,000 robotic machines already deployed in Iraq, he is also...
The Sixth Circuit last week rendered an important amended opinion in O'Bryan v. Holy See addressing the question of whether the Holy See could be sued for its role in the clergy sexual abuse scandal. The decision is fascinating and should be quite controversial. As an initial matter it is worth pondering the essential conclusion of the Court: every...
This story in the continuing saga of Bowoto v. Chevron should give human rights litigants pause: Chevron Corp., which prevailed in a human-rights lawsuit seeking to hold it responsible for the shooting of Nigerian protesters at an oil platform, is seeking nearly $500,000 in legal costs from the villagers who brought the suit. Chevron's claim for reimbursement, filed in...
The collision of two satellites in orbit around the earth, creating a cloud of debris and some amount of risk to the international space station, turns our thoughts to the international law of space. And thence to Glenn Harlan Reynolds, who explains it for us in a column at Popular Mechanics. I, for one, was surprised to actually read the...
