The beginning of Charles Taylor's trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone is obviously big news, and those who are interested in the trial should check out the live-blogging and analysis here. But Taylor's trial should not overshadow an equally important event related to the civil war in Liberia — the launch of Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission:The commission...
Luis Posada Carriles might have escaped justice for his many acts of terrorism, but three Panamanian officials who helped free him from jail in Panama might not be so lucky:Three collaborators of former Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso will be tried on January 14 for violations in the release of Cuban-born terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, judicial sources informed on Monday. Former Minister...
As most of you no doubt already know, David Wippman has been named dean at the University of Minnesota Law School. David is richly qualified for the position, with a strong background as both a scholar and an administrator. The question here is, how does the international law background of a decanal candidate play these days, relative to...
It has been a long time since the Supreme Court has referenced foreign and international sources in constitutional cases. Since Roper was decided in March 2005, the Supreme Court has not issued a single decision relying on the interpretive approach outlined in Roper and Lawrence. In the most recent term, I am not aware of a single Supreme...
I've mentioned in the past various pipe dreams of a US-Canada North American Union, or perhaps just a selective annexation of oil-rich Canadian provinces. Well, former French PM Balladur has gone one step further, proposing a "Union of the West" between the U.S. and Western Europe. Actually, it is not so much a Union as something closer to the old...
Here is a photo of Hitler you probably haven't seen: Strange, isn't it? We are used to seeing Hitler in black-and-white, not color. And that's the way Hitler wanted it, according to the Telegraph (UK) article about the photo:The Nazi leader believed that traditional black and white photographs best highlighted the sinister nature of his regime, presenting dramatic images...
José Padilla—who this past August was convicted of terrorism conspiracy—and John Yoo, one of, if not the, legal architect of the U.S. response to 9/11—have become near-household names in the fights over U.S. detention policies in the so-called "Global War on Terror." Today, that fight took on a much more personal character, as Padilla (and his mother) sued John...
The Pew Research Center has a nice end-of-the-year roundup of public opinion. According to Pew, here are the top public opinion stories of the year that have international themes (numbered in the order they placed in the overall listing): 7. A Better View of Iraq, Up to a Point… For years, public views of the war in Iraq were increasingly negative...
I am at the AALS conference in New York and don't have as much time to blog as I would like, but I want to flag a critically important recent decision by a magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York holding that human-rights groups have the same right as journalists to protect the confidentiality of their sources:A United...
I notice that none of us have posted on the Israeli military assault on Gaza. This is not surprising, there is very little useful to say about it, especially from a legal point of view. There is something depressingly predictable about the commentary arising out of Israel's military incursion into Gaza. Critics of Israeli policy in general have denounced the incursion, alleging...
The New York Times has an extremely interesting article on the role of availability cascades in media coverage of global warming. Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels...
It’s a happy new year (of sorts) for U.S. Human Rights Groups concerned about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur. For the last several years, groups such as the Save Darfur Coalition have pushed state and local governments to divest from companies that invest or do business with Sudan. Their efforts have produced some impressive results --since 2005,...
