We have certain images in our minds about that first Thanksgiving. It usually involves bountiful harvests, amicable relations with the Indians, and prayerful thanksgiving to Providence for his manifold blessings. Well, it wasn't quite that simple. Although there are various versions of the "first Thanksgiving," one event that has a strong claim to it occurred at Plymouth,...
If true, this is fantastic news:Strong hints have emerged that the Vatican is preparing to change its policy on the use of condoms in the fight against Aids, after a 200-page study on the question, commissioned by the Pope, was passed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for consideration. "This is something that worries the Pope a lot,"...
There’s been lots of recent buzz suggesting that the U.S. might start “talking with the enemy” (a.k.a. Iran). I suspect folks favoring such talks will groan when they hear CNN’s story of how an Iranian court is prepared to hand over the U.S. embassy in Tehran to an Iranian man, Hossein Alikhani, who successfully sued the United States in...
[Opinio Juris has requested David Sloss' permission to post this email he published on a international law list serve and he has kindly obliged] I finally was able to read the Texas court’s decision in Medellin. It strikes me that the court almost completely ignored the strongest argument in favor of the petitioner. That argument can be summarized as...
An astute reader forwarded this article to me about the role that the Library of Congress plays in assisting the Supreme Court and federal appellate courts in researching foreign and international law materials: Despite harsh criticism of the citation of foreign law in American court decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts solicit and are supplied with numerous...
Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and a number of other former U.S. Department of Justice officials filed an amicus brief yesterday in Al-Marri v. Wright, a case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (see the WPost article here). As a legal argument, the amicus brief offers little that is new or surprising. It...
As a number of critics of the U.N. reform process argued last year, the much-ballyhooed new United Nations Human Rights Council was unlikely to improve upon its much-derided predecessor. Those critics have been largely proven right by the Human Rights Council's performance thus far. Steadfastly one-sided and relentlessly obsessed with Israel, the Council has failed to build any...
Washington & Lee Law Library has just updated their law journal rankings. Here is their 2006 list of the top twenty-five comparative and international law journals based on total journal and case cite counts. (You get a different result if you include "impact factor" into the mix.) 1 American Journal of International Law 2 Tulane Law Review 3...
I noted a couple of weeks ago that the Iraqi High Tribunal's failure to release the written verdict at the same time that it announced Saddam's conviction was strong evidence that, despite my earlier skepticism, the announcement was timed to influence the U.S. elections. Well, the written verdict still has not been publicly released — making the inference of...
In my last post, I used Medellin as a lens to examine the role that judicial decisions play in charting the course of international law, suggesting that Vienna Convention rights may now be enshrined in ways that are impervious to any particular judicial decision. My point was not that the judiciary is insignificant – my point was simply that...
The logical conclusion of Chertoff, Gonzales, et al.'s reactionary hostility to international law?This is where we've arrived in this country: You have the constitutional right to burn an American flag, but you can get into trouble for simply flying a foreign one. At least you can in the 30,000-person town of Pahrump, Nevada, which is close to Las Vegas and even...
To further the discussion regarding Michael Chertoff's provocative speech last week, I wanted to identify one area where a strong argument could be made for the need for greater diversity of viewpoint on developing international norms. Consider the issue of the precautionary principle. There are numerous avenues to pursue this question, and there are fundamental principles at stake...
