My long slow slide into complete disenchantment with the Obama administration continues. Comes now, via my two favorite national-security law bloggers, Glenn Greewald and Scott Horton, a truly terrifying tale in which a nameless and faceless Department of Defense committee attempts to put Clive Stafford Smith, one of the world's great human-rights lawyers, in jail for...
[ Laura Dickinson is Foundation Professor of Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.] Recent attempts to criticize Harold Hongju Koh’s appointment to be the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State have gone from silly to absurd. Koh, currently the Dean and the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor at Yale Law School, is one...
Over at Volokh, Eric Posner has a very interesting post today on the Koh nomination. Here is a snippet: Foreign-law opponents, take heart! Koh is not a cosmopolitan who seeks to sacrifice American sovereignty to foreign gods. He is a liberal who wants to move American law to the left. International law serves as a handy vehicle, to be used or...
The more things change, the more things stay the same -- at least with this administration: He had become the most vocal opponent of the trial of Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr, taking on a position more akin to politician than lawyer and launching a two-year public and media campaign that landed him on the front pages of newspapers and inside...
Tod Lindberg, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and editor of Policy Review (and, full disclosure, good friend of mine) has a new article out in Commentary, "The Only Way to Prevent Genocide." The article argues that while "creative diplomacy" can make a difference, in "the end, it may all come down to the willingness of the United States to...
I was very happy to hear last week the news that Dean Harold Koh of Yale, someone I have known for many years and whom I greatly admire, was being nominated to head the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. It’s one of those picks that just makes sense: Koh is widely respected in the legal profession (among lawyers with a...
A quip that is often heard at gatherings international lawyers is "If I were [insert name of some prominent Bush Administration official], I wouldn't plan on any more vacations in Europe." Well, after all the talk of possible European prosecutions of one or more officials from the previous administration, the possibility has now taken a step closer towards becoming reality....
Complex Terrain Laboratory, where several OJ people sometimes participate, is hosting an online discussion next week on PW Singer's new book on robotics and war, Wired for War. We have mentioned this book in the past, and OJ has a number of posts on battlefield robotics in the last year or so. Singer is participating in the CTLab symposium and,...
That is the conclusion of the most comprehensive study of the issue to date, "Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars' Initiative," conducted by Purdue University. From the New York Times, which held follow-up interviews with some of the sources cited in the study: Charles W. Ingrao, the study’s co-editor, said that three senior State Department officials, one of them retired, and...
The following is a guest post written by Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub, the brains behind the must-read blog wronging rights. My thanks to them for contributing it. Two weeks ago, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. (We’re sure you all remember; it was kind of a...
Although Julian and I continue to disagree about the merits of the arrest warrant against Bashir, we agree on one thing: Obama's response to the expulsion of the humanitarian-aid groups has been appallingly weak. I'm not surprised -- I never bought into the cult of Obama, particularly its naive belief that his foreign policy and national-security policy would be fundamentally...
(Welcome Instapundit readers, and thanks Glenn for the Instalanche! Since you are likely already aware of the Freeman email, the discussion of a 'new liberal realism' is in the second half of the post.) OJ readers being very alert to the latest happenings in international politics, I imagine that folks are aware that Chas Freeman has withdrawn from consideration for a...
