One of the best things to happen to the international law academy in recent years is the introduction of methodological insights from other parts of the academy. Professors Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner, for instance, introduced a long overdue application of rational choice theory to international law in their recent book "The Limits of International Law." ...
In response to the book, Does Human Rights Need God, there is an interesting discussion over at Mirror of Justice (see here, here, and here) about the source of international human rights. As excerpted in this post, Robert George argues that “Most, but not all, natural law theorists are theists. They believe that the moral order, like every other...
Kevin earlier today asked about the extraterritorial reach of human rights treaties. But, what about U.S. statutes – how far do they reach? What exactly constitutes an extraterritorial application of U.S. law? On July 6, the Ninth Circuit addressed this issue in Pakootas v. Teck Cominco Metals, Ltd. (see here). The Ninth Circuit ruled that “slag” metal discharges from Teck...
Like you, I am good friends with millionaires living in Nigeria. If only I would renew my contact with them I could continue my business relationship and secure the millions that I am due as part of the partnership. I have been negligent in giving them my bank details to assist with the bank transfer, but for some...
The U.S. appeared before the UN Human Rights Committee on Monday — its first appearance since 1995 — to report on its implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Notably, Matthew Waxman, Principal Deputy Director for Policy Planning at the State Department reiterated the U.S. view that the ICCPR does not apply extraterritorially and thus...
The Bush administration plans on asking Congress for another $110 billion to finance its Iraq fiasco, which would bring the total spent on Iraq to more than $400 billion. But don't expect it to help Americans get out of Lebanon. What, you think the U.S. is made of money?Lebanon Situation Update - July 15, 2006 July 15, 2006 This information is current...
Martha Nussbaum favorably reviews Catharine MacKinnon’s Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues in the latest edition of The Nation. MacKinnon argues for the international criminalization of sex-related offenses against women (beyond such violence as occurs in the context of otherwise genocidal acts), a position with which Nussbaum strongly aligns herself as a theoretical matter. As for efforts...
Richard Pildes looks on the money when you line up two recent pieces of his with the decision in Hamdan. In the most recent Harvard Law Review, he and Daryl Levinson argue that separation of powers is contingent on divided control of the political branches, and that one-party (“unified”) government should push the Supreme Court to read congressional intent...
This candid conversation between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair is one of those very rare occasions where we get to be a fly on the wall and hear a private conversation between two heads of state discussing an international crisis. The video and audio from CNN is here. Here is a transcript provided by the BBC (with a...
After two years of pre-trial activity, nearly all of the 1,545 gacaca courts in Rwanda formally began trials on Saturday. Only 118 such courts had previously conducted trials, a kind of "pilot" program for the gacaca system. Gacaca courts were introduced in 1999 as a way of dealing with the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans accused of involvement in the...
There has been a raft of really tough op-eds and editorials against the Bush Administration in the last couple of days. In the LA Times, Mort Halperin calls Bush worse than Nixon (because Bush doesn't just violate the law, he openly defies it); Rosa Brooks ridicules the Hamdan response ("Creativity means never having to say you're sorry."); in the...
CNN has a great new feature that publishes emails of personal stories of people experiencing the war in the Middle East. Here is a taste: I am a Lebanese American currently staying at my family's country residence in Shemlan, Lebanon, located in the mountains above Beirut. My fiance and I came here with the intentions of writing our graduate school...
