A special thanks to Elizabeth Cassidy of UN Watch for her terrific month-long guest blogging stint at Opinio Juris. It was a first for us: guest blogging by an NGO on the ground at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The highlights of Elizabeth's blogging include an excellent summary of the debate over the Darfur resolution,...
There seems to be some resurgence in efforts to use state pension funds to foreign policy ends. California is looking to divest from companies doing business in Iran, and several states have done so with respect to Sudan (now supported by Mia Farrow and Martin Peretz). Are these measures unconstitutional? In February, a federal district court judge struck...
Jose Alvarez's ASIL presidential address is now up on the Society's website here, along with the companion 50 Ways IL Harms Us. I'd missed that the "smug levels" observation was part of a South Park allusion (see page 5), which may have sent some members running to their teenage grandchildren for guidance (though I have to admit that coming...
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a famously lax enforcer of U.S. immigration laws, has started to use its broad detention powers to pick up suspected human rights abusers or war criminals living in the United States. As the Washington Post reports: Ernesto Guillermo Barreiro seemed to fit in well with his neighbors in Virginia's placid horse country. The...
In what I suspect may be a new format for promoting international law conferences, Widener University's School of Law has put together an hour and a half streaming video with highlights from last year's 2 day conference, Envisioning a More Democratic Global System. The Conference was co-sponsored by the American Society of International Law and the Rockefeller Brothers...
The U.S. and South Korean announced yesterday that they have reached a bilateral free trade agreement - the first of its kind between the U.S. and a major Asian economy. Indeed, in terms of trade volume, "KORUS - FTA" immediately becomes the second most important trade agreement for the U.S. after NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). The text...
Opinio Juris has invited scholars who are experts in international environmental law to give their thoughts in the coming days on the Supreme Court's "global warming" decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. I am not an expert on either standing or environmental law, but I do know a fair bit about administrative law. In that vein, I wanted to...
Last week, I blogged about my primary frustration with SSRN: the long delay that occurs between uploading a revision to an essay and it replacing the old one. Gregg Gordon, the President and CEO of SSRN, graciously replied to my post — and then to my follow-up questions. Gregg has given me permission to reproduce our exchange, so...
When I decided to leave the University of Georgia for the University of Auckland, I worried that my American colleagues would think I was crazy to abandon a tenure-track job at an excellent law school to join a law faculty in a country best known for sheep and Lord of the Rings (and the Nuclear Tests Case, to nerdy lawyers),...
Less than six months after the Softwood Lumber Agreement was signed, the United States has invoked the dispute resolution provisions of the SLA to request formal consultations as a prelude to the filing of an arbitration claim. According to USTR, the dispute concerns application of the "surge" mechanism that is triggered when lumber prices fall below a certain threshold....
Word had it that Jose Alvarez would be not be offering up a conventional presidential address on Friday at the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law, and it lived up to the billing (good thing for the advance chatter; the general business session is usually skipable, unless you're winning an award, although I hear things were also...
The Australian has the complete text. Here are some of the juciest tidbits, with comments:b. I agree that I will not communicate with the media in any way regarding the illegal conduct alleged in the charge and the specifications or about the circumstances surrounding my capture and detention as an unlawful enemy combatant for a period of one (1)...
