In association with the International Commission of Jurists

North America

09 Feb

I have been meaning to do a post about the Supreme Court's first antidumping decision in decades, but frankly the case is a yawner. The question in United States v. Eurodif is whether the importation of low enriched uranium (LEU) is a good or a service. If it is the latter, then it cannot be subject to antidumping...

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05 Feb

I found this article in the Yale Alumni Magazine about Tony Blair's new Faith Foundation absolutely fascinating. Tony Blair is now teaching a course at Yale with the eminent theologian Miroslav Volf on the subject of "Faith and Globalization." According to the article, Blair is trying to use this foundation to encourage interfaith tolerance and dialogue. Given...

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04 Feb

The Second Circuit last week rendered another important ATS decision addressing some of the most troublesome issues relating to human rights litigation against corporate defendants. In the case of Abdullahi v. Pfizer, the Second Circuit was faced with the question of whether involuntary medical testing on humans violates international law. Perhaps the most significant part of the decision was the...

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02 Feb

My Washington College of Law colleague, Darren Hutchinson - a brilliant and distinguished scholar in constitutional law, jurisprudence, critical race theory and identity theory - takes on Human Rights Watch for the apparent shift in position on rendition it took under the Bush administration and long-time Washington advocacy director Tom Malinowski's comments on rendition under the Obama administration, as reported...

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22 Jan

I have a new paper up on SSRN, appearing shortly in the Wayne Law Review, The Assumptions Behind the Assumptions in the War on Terror: Risk Assessment as an Example of Foundational Disagreement in Counterterrorism Policy.  Here is the abstract from SSRN, with apologies from the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion: This 2007 article (based around an invited conference talk at Wayne...

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21 Jan

Although a DC resident, I couldn't persuade myself or my wife to brave the crowds or the cold to attend the inauguration yesterday, and instead watched it instead with a group of friends on hdtv.  Leaving aside Chief Justice Roberts fumbling the oath (see last graph in this post for President Obama retaking the oath on January 21), some of...

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20 Jan

Great inauguration speech by President Obama. In terms of foreign policy here are my quick thoughts. First, the speech was striking for President Obama's appeal to soft power. "Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us,...

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15 Jan

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Monday in the terrorism victim asset attachment case of Iran v. Elahi. (Transcript here). The case is extraordinarily complicated but it boils down to a question of statutory construction. Elahi was one of a handful of terrorism victims who received payment from the United States government under the 2000 Victims...

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04 Jan

John Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org website, has a provocative op-ed in today's Washington Post (January 4, 2009, B3) arguing that the evolution of battlefield robots might mean robots as the soldiers that do the killing on future battlefields: Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, "minds that are to our minds...

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03 Jan

Alan Dershowitz published an editorial yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that argues Israel's attacks on Hamas in Gaza are "perfectly proportionate."  I have no desire to argue the substance of that point, in part because views on Israel and Palestine are largely impervious to facts or argument (on both sides), but largely because the concept of proportionality is so...

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