Let me begin by saying that God and Gold is an ambitious book. According to Walter Russell Mead, the book is not about history, but about the meaning of history. What is the overarching plot of world history? Mead argues that history is best viewed from the perspective of Anglo-American power. He writes, “It is not...
When I was in grad school, my friends and I loved to play the "alive or dead" game, in which one of us would name an intellectual and the others would then try to guess whether that person was alive or dead. My ace in the hole was always Claude Levi-Strauss, the great structuralist French philosopher. My friends...
Human rights reporting season is upon us, and HRW is first out of the blocks with their annual report. This year's report highlights the disconnect between elections, democracy and human rights. Here's an excerpt from the press release:States claiming the mantle of democracy, including Kenya and Pakistan, should guarantee the human rights that are central to it, including the...
In order to get our readers thinking about Mead's book, let me highlight the key questions he seeks to answer in his book. These questions are, in Mead's view, the "six key questions about the world we live in" (p. 12): 1. What is the distinctive political and cultural agenda that the Anglo-Americans bring to world politics? 2. Why...
We are very pleased to introduce Walter Russell Mead to Opinio Juris readers to discuss his most recent book, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the country’s leading students of American...
According to the prediction market TradeSports, the likelihood that the Giants will win the Super Bowl today is trading at 18.8 percent. That compares to the likelihood of Middle East peace by January 2009 trading at 32.5 percent at Intrade. That's right, a Giants win is less likely than Middle East peace. ...
The D.C. Circuit on Friday ordered the government to provide detainees' lawyers and the court access to virtually all the information the government has on the detainees. The case attempts to balance the need for adequate information for federal court review of CSRT status determinations with the concerns about comprosing national security by providing sensitive documents to detainees' counsel,...
The latest law blogging trend — self-citation studies. Volokh, Concurring Opinions, Conglomerate, and Balkinization all seem to be moving us to a new status symbol for academic blogs: How many times have you been cited? Although most bloggers watch their sitemeter stats to get a sense of how the blog is doing, we all know that a...
If you do, the University of Auckland Faculty of Law is hiring. We're looking to fill two positions, one at the lecturer/senior lecturer level (the equivalent of assistant professor and associate professor with tenure) and one at the associate professor level (the equivalent of a full professor without a chair). We are primarily interested in academics who specialize...
This is an odd item on today's AP wires: A list of recent incidents of US diplomats who have gone off the administration talking points without permission. It includes UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad's appearance at Davos on the same stage as the Iranian Foreign Minister. I wonder, is there someone in the public affairs office at State...
Many thanks again to Monica Hakimi and Larry Helfer for commenting on my essay. I am grateful that they took the time to read and reflect upon it and to write such thoughtful comments for this symposium. Monica points to two potential dangers of competition in international adjudication: first, that competition “would result in more fragmentation and confusion in the law”;...
Thanks to Opinio Juris for inviting me to comment on Jacob Cogan’s interesting and thought-provoking paper, Competition and Control in International Adjudication. Jacob’s essay correctly recognizes that a system of controls is essential to the successful operation of the international legal system in general and international tribunals in particular. Controls are necessary, Jacob persuasively argues, because the states...
