According to the NYT, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter and the White House has reached a deal on a bill to subject President Bush's controversial NSA wiretapping program to limited judicial review. It's a little hard to figure out exactly what they've agreed to, but according to Sen. Specter, the bill will subject the program to a...
The International Court of Justice has rejected Argentina's request for an indication of provisional measures suspending Uruguay's construction of a pulp mill upstream on the River Uruguay. The Court concluded that: [t]here is nothing in the record to demonstrate that the actual decision by Uruguay to authorize the construction of the mills poses an imminent threat of irreparable damage to...
Interesting exchange between Larry Solum and Orin Kerr on whether teaching hurts scholarship. Here’s Larry’s point (which was in response to a more general post by Stuart Buck): Young scholars spend enormous amounts of time on the “canon,” the cases and rules that are in their casebooks. And so it is hardly surprising that many of them end up writing...
Professor Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell, a leading critic of the liberal internationalist movement in the academy, offers a surprisingly soft critique of the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan (a decision that is fast becoming the new rallying cry for conservatives). Rabkin, a frequent critic of the ICC, the use of international law in constitutional interpretation, and many international law regimes...
When I first interviewed for my present position at the University of Auckland, I was also invited to interview at the University of Western Australia, in Perth. Not having been to the Southern Hemisphere, I did what all good geographically challenged Americans do — I looked at the map and estimated that it would take two or three hours...
The idea that deporting criminals - especially hardened ones - rids us of the problems they present is put to rest by stories like this one from today's LA Times. Sending criminals to other countries can be a little like sending big hitters to the minor leagues - they end up having a field day. And insofar as...
According to the BBC, widely-anticipated peace talks between the Ugandan government and the notorious Lord's Resistance Army may fall apart due to the LRA's refusal to send any of their top five leaders to the planned meeting site. ICC arrest warrants have been issued against all of the five top LRA leaders and this may be the main reason...
Steve Charnovitz has an article on NGOs in the latest issue of the American Journal of International Law (check out the new cover), important not the least because it is one of only three "centennial essays" to mark the organization's hundredth birthday. That provides yet further evidence that NGOs really have arrived, when the fairly traditional AJIL features them in...
Jurist has a copy of the actual July 7, 2006 memorandum from Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England indicating that, in the aftermath of Hamdan, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions “applies as a matter of law to the conflict with Al Qaeda.” The Memo goes on to indicate that although DOD understands that “aside from the military...
Professor Ken Anderson has some belated and interesting commentary on the Hamdan decision over at his blog. He questions the buzz about the wholesale application of the Geneva Conventions in light of the characterization of the war on terror as a conflict "not of an international character." Here is an excerpt: [T]here are analytic problems with the Court's reasoning...
There is a firestorm brewing in the United Kingdom over the attempted extradition of three NatWest bankers allegedly involved in the Enron scandal. The nub of the problem is the US-UK Extradition Treaty has been signed into British law through legislation passed in 2003, but the U.S. Senate has yet to ratify the treaty. As a result the UK is...
As my new colleague Peter Spiro has already noted, this morning the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings to discuss how Congress should respond to last week’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and its invalidation of the Bush Administration’s military commissions program. Ironically, this afternoon, the Committee will get a chance to hear from one of the architects of that...
