In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Books

27 Jul

I want to thank the editors of Opinio Juris for hosting this forum and inviting me to participate, the editors of the Volume under review for their magnificent work in putting together such an impressive and comprehensive set of essays, and Andrew Kent for his thoughtful response to my contribution to the Volume. Let me here take up the two main...

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26 Jul

The joy of this project was making the kind of discovery Roger Alford recounts in his post. Alford’s chapter on international law as interpretive tool from 1901 to 1945 discusses, among other things, the Supreme Court’s various approaches to the extraterritorial reach of statutes during that period. Among these approaches was the government purpose test of Unites States v. Bowman...

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26 Jul

Harlan Cohen raises an important caution against being swept up in the attraction, indeed intellectual comfort, of an intellectual grand narrative that can give apparent coherence to a topic as broad-ranging and heterogeneous as international law in the Supreme Court.  The point is very well taken, particularly as it runs to the framing of historical periods; the device of historical periods is useful - essential even - to a point, but only if it is taken as the starting point for sorting things out and not the final arbiter of interpretation, especially on any particular matter. That said, there is more than simply an organizational imperative in asking some framing questions.  I'd like to raise a couple of them here, as a preface for the kinds of issues that most intrigue me in looking at this marvelous study.  They are not in any logical order, and one might easily argue that I've followed a kind of narrative imperative in the ones I've chosen, but they still seem to me important in practically any kind of historical study of this area.
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26 Jul

Harlan Cohen and Ingrid Wuerth have provided characteristically insightful comments about the overall strengths and weaknesses of the book. Cohen cautions that its “grand narrative” may make the outcomes of particular cases seem “overdetermined” and suggest that the Supreme Court is more “purposive” about its use of international law than is actually the case. Wuerth tactfully notes that the editors’...

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25 Jul

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court, edited by Bill Dodge, Mike Ramsey and David Sloss. Mike has already described the book’s purpose and organizational structure in a post from this morning. My post focuses on some of the book’s overall strengths and perhaps weaknesses. Edited volumes are hard to do...

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25 Jul

On behalf of myself and my co-editors David Sloss and William Dodge, thanks to Opinio Juris for hosting this book discussion.  As readers of this blog know, the twenty-first century’s first decade was an extraordinarily active one for international law in the Supreme Court.  In the debates about leading cases such as Medellin v. Texas and Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, we...

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23 Jul

I'm pleased to announce that Opinio Juris is hosting its latest book discussion this coming week.  We will feature International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court (CUP, 2011), which was edited by David Sloss, Mike Ramsey, and Bill Dodge.  In the interest of disclosure, I would note that two Opinio Juris regulars participated in the volume:  I authored the second chapter on how the...

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24 Mar

The excitement over the AQ7 ad put out by Liz Cheney's organization has died down, but Ben Wittes has this piece up in The New Republic extending the letter that he drafted, and to which I earlier linked, signed by a group of conservative and centrist folks criticizing it.  I was one of the signers, and wound up sticking up by own very lengthy comment about it over at Volokh.  I didn't link here at the time, as I thought the tone a little waspish for OJ, but with Ben's article in TNR, I'll change my mind and link to it (it's long and the title is "No Righteous Gentile Award, Please"). I suppose the key point for Ben and me, in somewhat different ways, is that we have each received much praise from folks on the left for defending Obama lawyers such as Neal Katyal or Jen Daskal.  No one objects to praise, or at least I don't, but much of it was a little misplaced.  The praise tended to be as though, in order to defend the Obama lawyers, we had somehow changed our minds about the Bush lawyers.  Whereas, for Ben and for me, each in somewhat different ways, the issue was the same.  We defended Katyal and Daskal because we had defended the Bush lawyers and thought the same principle applied.  I also followed up with an response to conservatives such as Andy McCarthy who attacked the Wittes letter; it too was fairly waspish in tone.  What with health care reform, and lots of other things on the agenda, the discussion is moving on, but it has been an important one, and at least among conservatives, a clarifying one. From the opening of Ben Wittes's essay:
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