I wanted to briefly point our readers to this smart oped in today's NY Times from OJ's own Peter Spiro on the constitutionality of Donald Trump's proposed ban on Muslim immigration into the U.S. Peter argues that, contrary to many people's expectations, such a ban would be constitutional. And that's the problem. Read the whole thing!...
Last week, the U.S. Congress passed the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 (or the "Space Act"), which will authorize private U.S. companies to own and sell resources they extract from objects in space. Supporters (and detractors) are calling this historic, because it is the first time the U.S. government has plainly authorized commercial exploitation of outer space...
Only a “truther” who denies that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 could doubt the international law basis for holding al Bahlul accountable for his role in this completed war crime. So Peter Margulies argues in his latest attempt to defend the indefensible: al-Bahlul's conviction for the non-existent war crime of conspiracy as an inchoate offence. To describe the accusation as offensive...
I had the honor and pleasure of testifying today before the U.S. Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. The topic of the hearing was "Examining International Climate Negotiations" and the upcoming conference in Paris. My own contribution argued that an agreement with legally binding emissions reduction obligations should be submitted to the Senate as a treaty rather than as a...
Ilya Somin has updated his post at the Volokh Conspiracy to include my critique, and his response to my critique. I just want to add two more points to our little debate on the domestic legal effect of the North Atlantic Treaty's Article V collective self-defense clause before we put it to rest. (For those of you looking for a...
Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy has suggested that if NATO invokes Article V's collective self-defense language against ISIS as a result of the terrible Paris attacks over the weekend, President Obama's ongoing use of military force against ISIS could be "legalized" as a matter of U.S. constitutional law. Here is Ilya: Article 5 provides a much stronger justification for the war...
It was only a matter of time before the far right began to attack Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) for being in league with the Taliban -- and thus implicitly (nudge nudge, wink wink) the actual party responsible for the US's notorious assault on its hospital in Kunduz. And the attack has now begun. Here is a snippet from an article today in the Daily Caller: International...
Over the past week, two posts at Just Security have argued that the ICC can prosecute the use of chemical and biological weapons as a war crime, even though they -- unlike other types of weapons -- are not mentioned in Article 8 of the Rome Statute. The first post was written by Ralf Trapp, who argued as follows: Furthermore, there are the...
I have been curious to see how China would respond to yesterday's UNCLOS Annex VII Arbitral Tribunal's ruling finding it has jurisdiction to hear the Philippines South China Sea related claims. Well, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was ready with this blistering response: Q: The Arbitral Tribunal established at the request of the Republic of the Philippines rendered the award...
There is a lot of interesting material revealed in the Charlie Savage NYTimes article on the legal justification for the Bin Laden raid (including how the Attorney General and Office of Legal Counsel were kept in the dark and out of the loop). But I want to focus on one paragraph in the article, which explained the lawyers' backup justification for...
The US Navy executed a much anticipated "freedom of navigation operation" (FONOP) today within 12 nautical miles of Subi reef, the site of one of China's artificial islands in the South China Sea. Predictably, China has reacted sharply to this operation by sending two Chinese destroyers to shadow the U.S. ship and planes, summoning the U.S. ambassador, and issuing angry...
Last week, the inestimable Chase Madar gave a fascinating talk at SOAS entitled "The Weaponisation of Human Rights." More than 100 people showed up, and I was privileged -- along with Heidi Matthews, a British Academy postdoc at SOAS -- to respond to Chase's comments. Here is Chase's description of the talk: Human rights, once a rallying cry to free prisoners of...
