In association with the International Commission of Jurists

National Security Law

04 Sep

This, according to an article in the Guardian, September 3, 2008, from a correspondent in Washington.  According to the story: "If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued," Biden said during a campaign event in Deerfield Beach, Florida, according to ABC. "[N]ot out of vengeance, not out of retribution," he...

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03 Sep

There are only two things about the consequences of the use of force that can be predicted with absolute confidence. One is that innocent lives will be destroyed. The other is that when democracies go on a war footing, the normally ample liberties of their residents (particularly resident aliens but also citizens) will shrink. It therefore follows from the description...

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03 Sep

In his opening post and in the opening chapter of his book, Tom Farer gives us a tour of the horizon of how international law and self-interest interact in American foreign policy thinking. He paints a picture which focuses on a struggle between two different views of America's role in the world, the Liberal view and the Neocon view. In this...

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03 Sep

I want to join the rest of Opinio Juris in welcoming Tom; I have read Confronting Global Terrorsm and American Neo-Conservatism with great interest and am looking forward to commenting on it.  As befits someone who, on some definitions anyway, probably counts as a neo-con, I have some disagreements with the book - starting, unsurprisingly, with the definition of neoconservative...

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03 Sep

Let me begin the discussion by addressing one of the most important issues addressed in Farer's book: combating terrorism consistent with the Charter. Farer presents the issue of the permissible options for the United States if it discovers that terrorist organizations or individuals are active in country X and planning an attack on American targets. If the...

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03 Sep

Eric Posner has a new post at The Volokh Conspiracy, "Surge of Ignorance," in which he quotes a number of New York Times columnists expressing skepticism toward the surge and then links -- in a different color font, for emphasis -- to a NYT article entitled "U.S. Hands off Pacified Anbar, Once Heart of Iraqi Insurgency."  Posner offers no editorial...

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02 Sep

I would like to begin by echoing Ben Wittes thanks to Chris and his colleagues for creating this vehicle for informal but rigorous discussion of critical issues at the juncture of law and public policy. And of courseI want to express my appreciation at being invited to discuss the themes of my book only partially because, as Oscar Wilde once...

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02 Sep

This week we are pleased to host the first discussion in the Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris Book Club. Tom Farer, the Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, will join us to discuss his new book, Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy. In addition, Kristen Boon...

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30 Aug

My blogging has slowed down the past couple of weeks, because I've been traveling and finishing a book chapter that criticizes Moreno-Ocampo's approach to deciding which situations to investigate.  (See my previous post.)  But I would be remiss if I did not mention this interesting piece of news -- the Fifth Circuit has reversed the district court's dismissal of the...

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25 Aug

Some hard-working soul on the Democratic vice presidential vetting team had to make her way through a law review article Joe Biden co-authored in the late 1980's on constitutional war powers. The piece is pretty safe stuff, advocating a "joint decision model" for use-of-force decisionmaking. In the course of proposing some tinkering with the War Powers Resolution, there is this...

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24 Aug

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my experiences in Georgia in the early 1990s, monitoring the various conflicts - Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the then-Georgian civil war in Tbilisi.  I noted that those secessionist conflicts were marked on each side by ethnic cleansing as extreme as anything I saw in the Yugloslav wars (a country which I also...

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23 Aug

(First, before anything else, a welcome to Eric Posner back to the blogosphere, lately of Slate's Convictions (in the same shutdown that gave OJ the welcome opportunity to snag Deborah Pearlstein) and now of Volokh Conspiracy, where Eric has been posting particularly related to the resurgence of Russia.) I have been writing in my own draft work this summer about the...

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