I want to thank Opinio Juris for having me over the next couple of weeks as a guest-blogger. I noticed that Eugene Kontorovich's thought-provoking posts last week dealt primarily with the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. My posts to start will not be that focused. If I had to discern one overarching theme for...
Last week was the deadline to register for upper-level electives at Harvard Law School. There are plenty of exotic foreign and international law school courses to choose from that appear nominally to relate to law. Here is a sample schedule with some notable gems: Monday evenings start the week off with the critically important course entitled...
There's gall -- and then there's the Sudan: Sudan said on Monday it had referred Chad to the U.N. Security Council, accusing its neighbour of launching an air raid inside Sudanese territory. Sudan's army said two Chadian planes attacked a region inside the west Darfur district on Thursday -- the fourth raid Khartoum says N'Djamena has carried out in Sudan in two...
Last week I wrote a post about secessionism in Flanders and regionalism in Europe, more generally. That post had been inspired by a post by "Chirol"at the blog Coming Anarchy. I now see that Chirol followed-up his original Flanders piece with an essay considering a possible future of microstates in Europe. He wrote: I’ve put together a map of the future of Europe in 2020....
A recent poll conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org has found that the public in four Muslim-majority and African countries support the ICC's arrest warrant for Bashir, despite the fact that the governments in those countries oppose it: That's remarkable -- but the results of another question, designed to assess support for intervening in Darfur, by force if necessary, should the much-feared...
It takes a special kind of stupid to be Pat Buchanan. Last night, in response to a question from Rachel Maddow about whether his hostility to elevating a Latina to the Supreme Court makes sense given that 98% of Justices (108/110) have been white, Buchanan said: "White men were 100% of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100%...
The Wall Street Journal has the story: After six days of grueling debate, Iceland's parliament voted narrowly Thursday to apply to join the European Union -- an institution from which the country long stood proudly apart. But a binge of overseas expansion by Iceland's buccaneering banks led to a towering stack of bills that couldn't be paid when the credit crunch cut...
David Bernstein is in high-dudgeon mode again about Human Rights Watch's fundraising in Saudi Arabia. This time, he is up in arms about a statement Ken Roth made to The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg during a recent email exchange. Goldberg asked Roth if his "staff person attempt[ed] to raise funds in Saudi Arabia by advertising your organization's opposition to the pro-Israel...
[Kenneth L. Gartner is a partner with Lynn & Gartner in Mineola, New York and an adjunct professor at Touro Law School. He has served as a New York State District Court judge] The classic formulation of the basic premise underlying the Arab-Israeli “peace process” is “land for peace.” Its proponents thus categorize the so-called peace process as...
Related to Ken's earlier post, Amos Guiora has a piece up at Foreign Policy describing the legal analysis he applied when advising the Israeli Defense Forces on targeted killings of terrorists. He argues that international law permits targeted killing when certain conditions are met: The decision to use targeted killing of terrorists is based on an expansive articulation of the concept...
Two updates of note. First, the Ugandan government has said in no uncertain terms that it will arrest Bashir if he enters the country: Henry Oryem Okello, Uganda's minister for international affairs, spoke after meeting with the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, in Kampala. Police "will ensure that he is arrested" if al-Bashir arrives, Okello said. Ocampo added: "It is...
Yesterday the Obama Administration released the report of the Intelligence Community Inspectors General. It is an important and interesting story about the Bush Administration's Presidential Surveillance Program (PSP). Jack Balkin has more here and here and Andy McCarthy here. The most gripping story in the report is the fight between the White House and the Department of...
