[John E. Noyes is the Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at California Western School of Law.] The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee is currently holding hearings on U.S. acceptance of the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, as modified by the 1994 Part XI Implementation Agreement (the “LOS Convention”). The Committee favorably reported the LOS Convention in 2004...
[Dr. James Kraska, Commander, U.S. Navy, is the Howard S. Levie Chair of Operational Law at the U.S. Naval War College]. Thanks for the opportunity to talk a bit about the major national security and strategic interests of the United States in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It is also a pleasure to exchange thoughts on the...
[Craig H. Allen is the Judson Falknor Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle.] I would like to begin by thanking Opinio Juris for hosting this timely and important debate on the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC) and Julian Ku in particular for inviting me to participate. My small contribution begins with two...
From the first class I ever took on international law, I've heard (mostly negative) references to the U.S. refusal to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. I've heard again and again throughout my studies about how the U.S. was shirking its global responsibilities as well as how the U.S. was hurting its own national interests by...
That's the question being asked this past week over at US News & World Report's Debate Club. To answer it, US News assembled 7 experts who, with the exception of Bruce Schneier, replied in some form of the negative (see e.g. the responses of Herb Lin (no, or not yet), James Lewis (it's not workable) Sean Lawson (it would be...
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has an op-ed in the WSJ announcing his opposition to US ratification of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The op-ed is probably meant to soften the force of an earlier WSJ op-ed by former Republican Secretaries of State calling for US ratification. He is also testifying on Thursday at...
Not according to John Yoo. Believing a recent NY Times article to be accurate, Yoo criticizes the President for “personally select[ing] the targets and approv[ing] each operation” and characterizes this as “an incredible misuse of presidential time and a serious distortion of proper war management.” Yoo more recently posited, in response to reports of al-Libi’s successful targeting, “the greater threat to...
This past Monday, my Taming Globalization co-author John Yoo and I hosted a number of scholars at an American Enterprise Institute conference to discuss the impact of globalization on U.S. sovereignty. We were fortunate to have the participation of smart and interesting scholars like Tom Lee of Fordham Law, Tai-heng Cheng of New York Law School and Quinn Emanuel, our own Peter...
Given my basic cynicism toward just about everything, I'm difficult to shock. But I was certainly shocked to learn that Yale University is allowing Gen. Stanley McChrystal to teach a course that enrolled students have to agree in writing not to discuss. Here is Gian Gentile, a professor at West Point, criticizing the course in The Atlantic: Enter retired...
[David Sloss is the Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Global Law and Policy at Santa Clara Law School] In Samantar v. Yousuf (2010), the Supreme Court directed lower courts to apply common law rules to resolve immunity defenses raised by individual foreign government officers, except in cases where a treaty provides the controlling rule. The Court remanded...
Earlier today, Russia called on the ICC to investigate possible war crimes committed by NATO forces during its bombing campaign in Libya: The International Criminal Court should look into all cases of NATO airstrikes in Libya that resulted in civilian deaths, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "We welcome the decision of ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to consider alleged violations of international humanitarian...
This is the third day in our discussion of Professor Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Links to the related posts can be found below. Following-up on my earlier post on the difficulty of changing contracting practices by executive agencies, I thought I’d highlight a few quotes from a January 2011...
