It’s a busy time of year for international lawyers. For those of us who work as academics, we’re busy writing and grading exams. For those working for governments, international organizations and NGOs, the spring season of treaty negotiations and meetings is in full swing. This week, for example, negotiators and other interested stakeholders are in Geneva for the Second Conference...
Bolivia’s President Evo Morales announced today the nationalization of Bolivia’ oil industry:In a May Day speech, he said foreign energy firms must agree to channel all their sales through the Bolivian state, or else leave the country. He set the firms a six-month deadline, but the military and state energy officials have already started taking control of the oil fields. Although...
Check out these current and historical photos over at Slate honoring International Workers Day, which, despite its origins in the US, is not celebrated here. But it is still a holiday in many countries. And it is no coincidence that today was chosen to be boycott day (El Gran Paro Americano) for US immigrants. Whether your sympathies lie...
Ian Best at 3L Epiphany has indexed all the posts (almost 50 of them!) about the Harvard Blogging Conference here. I had the good fortune of having lengthy discussions with Ian and have really grown to appreciate the service he is providing to the legal blogosphere. ...
Unlike any other blogger who attended the Harvard Blogging Conference on Friday, I also took the opportunity to attend another conference sponsored by the Harvard Project on Negotiation on the same day. The parallels between the two conferences were striking. The focus of the negotiation conference was to honor the life and work of...
The ICTR and Rwanda are quarreling again — this time over the ICTR's willingness to drop genocide charges in order to convince defendants to plead guilty. Last week the ICTR entered into such a plea bargain with Paul Bisengimana, who admitted to murder and extermination as crimes against humanity in connection with the massacre of nearly 1,000...
Kudos to the organizers and panelists on a great conference at Harvard Law School on blogging and legal scholarship. There are plenty of wonderful summaries of the conference at Legal Theory Blog, Ann Althouse, Discourse and Conglomerate. Best of all are the conferences papers, which I recommend you read if you are at all interested in...
Today, the State Department released its second, annual Country Report on Terrorism. The 292 page report contains an extensive overview of terrorists and their activities from the U.S. government’s point of view. The report’s raw numbers are striking -- 11,000 incidents of terrorism in 2005, resulting in the deaths of 14,500 people, leaving 25,000 others wounded and 35,000...
On Wednesday the city of London faced one of the most bizarre terrorist threats in its history: terrorist nail bombs as works of art. As reported here, a 36-year-old woman thought it would be an act of artistic expression to distribute various parcels throughout the city that had the look and feel of a terrorist package, such as the one...
After some last-minute lobbying of his own provinces by new Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the U.S. and Canada have announced an agreement settling their multi-decade lumber trade dispute. A copy of at least one version of the agreement can be found here. (Continue Reading) I can't speak to the actual substance of the agreement (who cares?). From a legal perspective,...
This seems to be cryptography’s breakout year. First we hAd all that FISA fun, then the breathleSs anticipation of the movIe release of the Da Vinci Code, and now the Smithy Code! Yes, Friends, it seems that Judge Smith, the witty High Court judge presiding over the recent U.K. copyright infringement trial against Da Vinci Code author Dan brown, has...
The Third Circuit this week rendered an interesting and unusual case on The Hague Convention on The Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. In Karkkainen v. Kovalchuk, the Third Circuit was faced with a precocious and intelligent eleven-year-old who had lived with her mother and stepfather in Finland. But Maria Kovalchuk increasingly grew to love the United States when...
