Any American who has ever watched the British Commons debates on TV cannot help sighing in embarrassment and shame at the sheer inarticulateness of our American counterparts in the House and Senate. Wit and intelligence are not even at issue; successfully stringing together a subject and predicate, and to do so in less than a quarter hour, is. ...
They number at least 12,000,000, though a precise count is impossible because many governments refuse to consider them a legitimate category for census purposes. They suffer serious and widespread employment discrimination, especially their women, leading to unemployment rates often 6-8 times greater than the countries in which they live. They are sequestered in dangerous, environmentally-degraded slums,...
Russia continues to keep the pressure on Canada in the race to claim rights over the seabed underneath the Arctic Sea. THE battle for "ownership" of polar oil reserves has intensified with Russia sending a fleet of nuclear-powered ice-breakers into the Arctic. It has reinforced fears that Moscow intends to unlawfully annex a vast portion of the ice-covered...
Ken's already up on the boards below, but I just wanted to add our official welcome to him for the coming week as a guest blogger. I'm confident that Ken is known to most of you for his always engaging and provocative scholarship as well as his eclectic blogging on Law of War and Just War Theory Blog (where...
My dear friend and sometimes co-author, David Rieff, has an opinion piece in today's Los Angeles Times, evincing great skepticism about calls for outside military intervention to deliver aid in Burma. "Save Us From the Rescuers, LA Times Opinion, May 18, 2007. The piece is closely related to Kevin's post citing John Boonstra's concerns that the meaning of...
My thanks to everyone at Opinio Juris for inviting me to guest blog this week. I am a very big admirer of this blog and have been since its beginning - I admire its political balance, its civility, and the high intellectual standards it sets. Plus it's fun to read. I'll try to live up to those...
Having grown up on Green Lantern comics (and having one friend quip that she thinks that explains my becoming an international lawyer), I was nonetheless somewhat stunned to come across the following on Wagner James Au’s New World Notes blog, which covers the evolution of Second Life, the online “virtual world”:Second Life has a Darfur, so it’s sad (though...
I have thought all along that bringing an ICJ case against Iran for "incitement to genocide" against Jews in Israel is a useless gesture (and one with a weak legal footing to boot). But former U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney seemed attracted by the idea, and now, new Australian Prime Minister Paul Rudd is saying that Australia...
The California Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage wasn't the only good human-rights news yesterday. Also exciting is the Court of Arbitration for Sport's decision to allow Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee sprinter, to compete for a place in the Beijing Olympics:The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied...
In a strange move, the Supreme Court on Monday affirmed the ATS Apartheid case of Khulamani v. Barclay Bank (recaptioned at the Supreme Court as American Isuzu Motors v. Ntsebeza). The stated reason? The Court lacked a quorum. From the docket sheet: Because the Court lacks a quorum, 28 U.S.C. § 1, and since a majority of the...
Chimene detects some nostalgia in Beyond Citizenship's suggestion that America may be unsustainable in the long run. But how could I not be nostalgic? I'm an American, and America has had a pretty good run of it. At least I recognize the nostalgia. One thing that is both fascinating and frustrating about engaging on citizenship issues...
I had contemplated weighing in on commentators' unfortunate tendency to equate the Responsibility to Protect doctrine with humanitarian invasion, but John Boonstra at UN Dispatch beat me to it. Here's a snippet:First, by and large, the R2P doctrine has been misunderstood or misrepresented in calls to "invade" Burma. R2P is often implied to boil down to a simple equation:...
