It's a tiny bit off topic, but it's worth noting that after much bluster about how the ICC was destroying the "peace process" in the Sudan by indicting Bashir, none of the Security Council members put deferring the prosecution under Article 16 of the Rome Statute on the Council's agenda for September. Over at UN Dispatch, our colleague John Boonstra...
This, according to an article in the Guardian, September 3, 2008, from a correspondent in Washington. According to the story: "If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued," Biden said during a campaign event in Deerfield Beach, Florida, according to ABC. "[N]ot out of vengeance, not out of retribution," he...
I want to join the rest of Opinio Juris in welcoming Tom; I have read Confronting Global Terrorsm and American Neo-Conservatism with great interest and am looking forward to commenting on it. As befits someone who, on some definitions anyway, probably counts as a neo-con, I have some disagreements with the book - starting, unsurprisingly, with the definition of neoconservative...
Let me begin the discussion by addressing one of the most important issues addressed in Farer's book: combating terrorism consistent with the Charter. Farer presents the issue of the permissible options for the United States if it discovers that terrorist organizations or individuals are active in country X and planning an attack on American targets. If the...
Eric Posner has a new post at The Volokh Conspiracy, "Surge of Ignorance," in which he quotes a number of New York Times columnists expressing skepticism toward the surge and then links -- in a different color font, for emphasis -- to a NYT article entitled "U.S. Hands off Pacified Anbar, Once Heart of Iraqi Insurgency." Posner offers no editorial...
The World Bank last week released new figures - reflecting new and improved methodology - on the number of people in poverty around the world. The effect was to increase the number from roughly a billion people to something like 1.4 billion. The Economist explains: IN APRIL 2007 the World Bank announced that 986m people worldwide suffered from extreme poverty—the first...
... and hoping that the damage is minimal and that everyone is safe, including any OJ readers. Watching the television today caused me to recall a conference I attended a few years ago, a meeting of humanitarian disaster professionals who dealt with developing world disasters ranging from natural disasters to conflict relief. At one session, on natural disasters and, as...
My blogging has slowed down the past couple of weeks, because I've been traveling and finishing a book chapter that criticizes Moreno-Ocampo's approach to deciding which situations to investigate. (See my previous post.) But I would be remiss if I did not mention this interesting piece of news -- the Fifth Circuit has reversed the district court's dismissal of the...
The Supreme Court's Medellin decision has generated lots of academic attention (Julian and I, for example, are both participating in a joint ASIL-ABA Task Force on Treaties developed to address the future status of treaties in US law, which I'm sure will generate blog posts from one or both of us in the months ahead). This past week also saw the DC Circuit rely on Medellin explicitly...
I have blogged in the past about the growing phenomenon of 'libel tourism' and its chilling effects upon free expression, as well as some (really, considering the free expression issues under threat, quite modest) New York state and US federal legislative efforts to deal with it. It amounts to using English courts and their views on libel, together with the...
That essentially was the question the Ninth Circuit had to address in the recent case of United States v. Liu. The question arose out of a criminal prosecution by the United States against defendant for running a brothel in Saipan. Defendant argued that the United States had no authority to prosecute her under the commerce clause or the...
Some hard-working soul on the Democratic vice presidential vetting team had to make her way through a law review article Joe Biden co-authored in the late 1980's on constitutional war powers. The piece is pretty safe stuff, advocating a "joint decision model" for use-of-force decisionmaking. In the course of proposing some tinkering with the War Powers Resolution, there is this...
