In association with the International Commission of Jurists

National Security Law

25 Nov

[Chris Jenks is an assistant professor of law at SMU Dedman School of Law. He previously served as chief of the US Army’s international law branch where his responsibilities included foreign criminal jurisdiction (FCJ) over US service members.] The U.S. and Afghanistan recently initiated formal discussions concerning the continued presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014, when Afghanistan is expected...

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14 Nov

I have been having an interesting twitter exchange with Ben Wittes about an online "Choose Your Own Adventure" game created by the Truman National Security Project.  The game, which is entitled "Tell Me How This Ends," asks you to decide how the President of the United States should respond to news that Iran has accumulated enough enriched uranium to build...

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01 Nov

I blogged late last year about the UK Court of Appeal's judgment in Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs v. Rahmatullah, which implicitly repudiated a little-known OLC memo written by Jack Goldsmith that concluded “operatives of international terrorist organizations” are not “protected persons” for purposes of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention -- a provision that prohibits...

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30 Oct

The article, which is available in draft form on SSRN, is entitled "'One Hell of a Killing Machine': Signature Strikes and International Law."  It is forthcoming in the Journal of International Criminal Justice as part of a mini-symposium on targeted killing edited by Cornell's Jens Ohlin.  Here is the abstract: The vast majority of drone attacks conducted by the U.S. have...

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23 Oct

Julian beat me to discussing Romney's statement last night that, if elected, he would “make sure that Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation" (what we ICL scholars call "direct and public incitement to genocide").  I disagree with Julian, however, that Ahmadinejad could not be prosecuted in the United States.  Pursuant to the Genocide...

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23 Oct

I've long wondered whether and when the American Law Institute (ALI) might try to update its 3rd Restatement on the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.  Since its 1987 publication, the two-volume set, culled together under the leadership of Professor Lou Henkin, has had a tremendous impact.  It has been a frequent resource for U.S. courts and American international...

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19 Oct

Earlier this week, Harold Koh gave a speech.  And it wasn't about conflicts, drones, or cyberwar, topics that have dominated the attention of international lawyers in recent years.  Rather, Koh's speech was a meditation on the processes of international law-making that confront the State Department on a daily basis.  It was, simply put, a survey of the current international legal landscape...

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19 Oct

As Peter's post yesterday noted, there's a growing push to fundamentally re-align cyberspace governance via amendments to the ITU Regulations, which are set to be negotiated in December in Dubai.  I'm not sure that the ITU is up to the task.  But I do agree that the time is ripe for States and other stakeholders to agree on first principles...

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17 Oct

Jack Goldsmith offers five thoughts today at Lawfare about the D.C. Circuit's Hamdan II decision.  I agree with two of his thoughts -- that the government is free to rely in future prosecutions on alternatives to material support (MST) such as aiding and abetting terrorism, and that (sadly)  al-Bahlul could be detained indefinitely if he is ultimately acquitted by his...

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17 Oct

The media and blogosphere are predictably -- and justifiably -- abuzz about Candy Crowley pointing out that Romney was wrong when he claimed it took Obama two weeks to label the Benghazi attack an "act of terror."  More interesting, though, is the push-back from Romney surrogates like Ed Gillespie, who said afterward that "[s]he was wrong about it, no doubt...

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