Regions

The Institute for War & Peace Reporting has a must-read article today about how ordinary Darfuris view the OTP's decision to seek arrest warrants for the rebel leaders allegedly responsible for killing 12 peacekeepers in 2007.  According to the article -- and all the usual caveats about anecdotal evidence apply -- the response is uniformly negative: Yasir, an IDP (internally displaced...

Remarkable story in today's Wall Street Journal, front page, December 1, 2008, about a Latvian economist arrested and held for several days - not finally charged - for expressing pessimistic sentiment about the stability of the Latvian financial system: How to Combat a Banking Crisis: First, Round Up the Pessimists   Latvian Agents Detain a Gloomy Economist; 'It Is a Form of Deterrence' I have stuck...

Violence in Kenya following the disputed 2007 elections left more than 1,300 people dead and more than 500,000 internally displaced.  Last month, Kenya's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence released a 527-page report -- the Waki Report -- that concluded much of the violence was planned and organized by members of Kenya's security agencies, business leaders, politicians, and government officials. ...

Coming Anarchy has this post on the possibility of Greenland becoming an independent country, noting that Greenland this week voted with a supermajority of more than 75% to receive greater autonomy from Denmark. This may even lead to independence for this enormous island of just 56,000 people. For more on "arctic nationalism," including recent events in the Faroe Islands, check out the...

Edward Lucas has an essay in The Economist on political philosophy and the (r)evolution of central and eastern European politics centered on 1989. His essay begins: They gripped the world, but left political philosophers yawning. According to Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, the revolutions that overturned decades of totalitarian rule in central and eastern Europe in 1989 were marked by a...

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...