Let me add my own thoughts to what Julian has said regarding yesterday's oral argument in Permanent Mission to India v. City of New York. I agree that the case is boring, but there is one really interesting issue regarding the use of a foreign treaty as legislative history. The precise statutory question was the meaning of the...
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a long-running dispute between the City of New York and the governments of India and Mongolia over their tax liability for real property used for their permanent missions to the United Nations. A transcript of oral argument is here. (See SCOTUSBlog's very useful summary here and other links to...
Michael Hirsh thinks it is, in this tightly argued piece in the latest edition of the Washington Monthly. He takes on the new conventional wisdom that the global system will have to be fundamentally reordered in the wake of the Bush Administration’s “lethal mixture of arrogance and incompetence.” The article singles out Obama and his foreign policy crew...
The ICTR has apparently refused to open an investigation into allegations that the current Rwandan President Paul Kagame was complicit in the 1994 assassination credited with setting off the Rwandan genocide of that year. The allegation of Kagame's complicity in that 1994 assassination was made by a French judge and have so enraged the Rwandan government that it is...
[UPDATE: Moved to the Front as Deadline Looms!] Are you the sort of person who reads Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s transcript before the GTMO Military Commission and wonders about the legal status of the war on terror? Do you sort your Hollywood celebrities based on the substance of their position on what to do about Darfur? Do you enjoy...
I had the good fortune to visit Columbia Law School last week to debate with Sarah Cleveland the merits and demerits of constitutional comparativism. It was a first class program with an introduction from ASIL President Jose Alvarez and thoughtful reflections from the panelists. The low point for me was the attempt by one speaker (not Alvarez, Cleveland or Jackson)...
The Chief Prosecutor for the ICTY is defending herself from charges by her former deputy that she improperly agreed to conceal information that could have exposed Serb responsibility for the Bosnian genocide, according to this IWPR report. According to Carla Del Ponte's spokeperson, "the suggestion that there was a deal to conceal evidence is completely false." The mini-tempest was raised by...
Professor Eric Posner's op-ed in the Saturday WSJ($) (free version now available here) offers a typically unsentimental, hard-eyed assessment of the value of international human rights law. That value, according to Posner, appears to be zero. Here is brief excerpt,(Continue Reading) Today, the future of the international human rights legal regime is bleak. And yet if what matters is not...
What happens if a foreign national is informed of his VCCR rights and declines the opportunity to invoke them? That was one of the critical issues in the recent death penalty case of Marquez-Burrola v. State, 2007 WL 1140411. Here is an excerpt of the decision from the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (the highest court in Oklahoma...
Although the sweetheart deal Paul Wolfowitz arranged for Shaha Ali Riza strikes me as far more problematic than it does Julian, we should not let that dispute distract our attention from the many other indefensible things Wolfowitz has done as head of the World Bank. Exhibit A: trying to undermine the Bank's traditional emphasis on family planning in developing...
How did I miss this? Yesterday, Rwanda filed an application against France in the International Court of Justice seeking a declaration that certain French arrest warrants against Rwandan government officials violate international law (only the press release announcing the application, but not the application itself is online. While you are reading the press release, check out the spiffy new...
‘Tis the season for academic conferences. I’m off today to participate in a conference tomorow, April 20, organized by Professors John Kroger and John Parry at Lewis and Clark Law School, entitled “Crime, War Crimes and the War on Terror.” Addressing the linkages (and tensions) implicit in this theme, the Conference will consist of four panels: (1)...
