Last month the Supreme Court rendered its latest installment on the issue of judicial supervision of national security. Winter v. NRDC has received surprisingly little attention, but it strikes me as an important example of judicial deference to the Executive Branch in military affairs. This language in particular is noteworthy: We “give great deference to the professional judgment of...
(Professor Martin Scheinin, whose mission and report on the US and counterterrorism and human rights I discussed below, was kind enough to post a substantive response to my earlier post, "Try or Release." Particularly since I was quite critical of that report, let me move Professor's Scheinin's response up to its own post. Apologies for not noticing it earlier -...
Thanks to Deborah for that thoughtful response re the administrative detention debate ongoing now ...
As a follow-up to Peggy's very interesting post below on the performance of global versus non-global law firms, let me raise an issue that has, for obvious reasons, disappeared in the last year, but which was a topic of discussion in 2007 and might well re-surface at point in the future: law firms going public via an IPO and listing...
Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner have an interesting op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal (November 25, 2008), "Does Europe Believe in International Law?" I believe it is behind the subscriber wall, but it offers a series of instances in which, in effect, Europe says one thing and does another. In fact, Europe's commitment to international law is largely rhetorical. Like the...
I was asked to respond to Bret Boyce’s recent article, published in the Yale Journal of International Law and entitled “Obscenity and Community Standards.” My one sentence summary of his thesis is this: Pornography is private sexual expression with which legislatures and courts should not interfere. Although this article was published in a forum dedicated to international law, it doesn’t...
My congratulations to Professor Hakimi on a very intelligent article, with which I am largely in sympathy, and also to Matt Waxman for his response. I'm on the fly, without access to documents or the ability to search the web, so forgive the broad brush nature of this comment and question, but let me put it anyway (I'm depending on...
US Navy vessel confronts Somali pirates, 2006. Photo credit Chief Petty Officer Kenneth Anderson, USN, open access DOD (no, not me, but we Ken Andersons really get around). Somali pirates strike again, this time hijacking a Saudi-owned tanker off the coast of Kenya. The running stand off with the hijacked ship carrying arms and a Ukrainian crew continues; Russia announces that...
As most readers likely know, Germany recently arrested Rose Kabuye, the President of Rwanda's chief of protocol, on behalf of France, who intends to prosecute her for being involved in shooting down then-President Juvenal Habayarimana's plane, the event that triggered the Hutu-led 1994 genocide. It appears that Kabuye actually wants to be prosecuted, because it will give her -- and...
I sharply criticized New York Times reporter William Glaberson - the Times's chief Guantanamo reporter - last week for, among other things, failing to take note of Benjamin Wittes and the centrality of his book, Law and the Long War. I am happy to report that Glaberson has a new article out in today's NYT, this time interviewing a wide...
Today is the global financial crisis summit in Washington DC, with attendance by leaders of the G20. Bloomberg reports that the most likely results are: agreement to a global fiscal stimulus aimed supporting aggregate demand while waiting for monetary stimulus (i.e., interest rate cuts by central banks) to take effect; reform of the IMF to put it at the center of addressing...
Friends often ask me what my favorite treaty is (OK, none of my friends ask me this, but they should). I'd have to say the 1909 U.S.-Canada International Boundary Treaty (BWT) ranks right up there -- for nearly a century it has dealt, mostly successfully, with all sorts of questions relating to the shared water resources of the U.S. and Canada,...
