I am in Israel this week on a nationwide tour with Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders from Los Angeles to examine in detail the current state of Israeli-Palestinian relations. We have heard from Arab and Jewish members of the Knesset, visited hot spots along the Green Line, toured holy sites together, spoken with journalists who report from both sides...
[Margaret V. Sachs is the Robert Cotten Alston Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and an expert on securities law] The Supreme Court yesterday issued its decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank, its first ever on the international reach of Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5. Justice Scalia wrote for the Court, with additional...
That’s a remarkable statement, but it actually is true. Yesterday the Supreme Court in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project addressed the question of whether a federal statute criminalizing the provision of “material support” to terrorist organizations was constitutional. A humanitarian NGO group wanted to train members of two terrorist organizations, the PKK and the LTTE, to become more...
Someone should tell Mr. Netanyahu that he is supposed to wait until after the inquiry to announce its predetermined findings: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of Monday's cabinet meeting that the main goal of the Gaza flotilla probe is to prove to the world that the Israel Navy operation on the Gaza-bound aid ship was...
The Jerusalem Post reports that the Turkish government, in collaboration with Hamas, is considering applying to the International Court of Justice over the Gaza Flotilla incident. The agreement to work together against Israel reportedly came in a Thursday telephone conversation between Turkey's justice minister, Sadullah Ergin and his Hamas counterpart, Muhammad Faraj Al-Ghoul. As the article points out, it is far from...
A few days ago, I recorded a conversation for Bloggingheads.tv with Mark Leon Goldberg of the invaluable UN Dispatch. It was a wide ranging discussion -- and long, 45 minutes -- covering everything from the Gaza blockade to the definition of aggression to drone attacks. Something tells me, though, that the only thing people will remember is my description of...
Despite the increasingly desperate nature of the attacks on Judge Goldstone, I never thought an academic institution would give in to the hysteria: In response to an enquiry by the Alternative Information Center (AIC) about its reported removal of Judge Richard Goldstone from the Board of Governors, Hebrew University of Jerusalem responded by email that: "The Hebrew University of Jerusalem...
This would be amusing, were the Obama administration not backing Israel's insistence that any investigation into the attack on the flotilla be conducted (read: whitewashed) by Israel itself: When placed under journalistic scrutiny, the IDF is being forced to admit that its claims about the flotilla’s links to international terror are based on innuendo, not facts. On June...
[Peter "Bo" Rutledge is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Georgia Law School and the author, with Gary Born, of International Civil Litigation in United States Courts] I’ve been thinking a lot about Samantar since its release as I expect it’ll occupy an important place in the next edition of Gary’s and my International Civil Litigation (we’re working on...
I'm not about to get into a debate over whether there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza; you either think there is or you don't, and facts won't matter. So I thought I would simply post the following chart from that notorious left-wing propaganda outlet The Economist and let readers judge for themselves whether the blockade is designed solely to...
In addition to saying kind things about me, which I appreciate, Julian noted in his earlier post that Eric Posner has an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal that uses Lincoln's blockade of the Confederate States of America (CSA) to defend the legality of Israel's blockade of Gaza. I find the editorial very unconvincing, for two reasons. First, it provides...
The most interesting aspect of the Samantar v. Yousuf opinion yesterday was the final section addressing the "artful pleading" problem. The Court stated that "[e]ven if a suit is not governed by the [FSIA], it may still be barred by foreign sovereign immunity under the common law. And not every suit can successfully be pleaded against an individual...
