Like many of my students, I sometimes find the law's indeterminacy and disagreement over its content disturbing and frustrating. So it is a relief to return to the very few legal rules things that (almost) everyone agrees with. As the NYT's analysis today points out, there is utter and complete consensus among legal scholars that Congress could repeal...
Here is a nice summary of the present conflict and some basic information about Hezbollah from the Council on Foreign Relations website. Bottom line is this is a political organization in Lebanon that has twenty-three seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament and two ministers in the Lebanese government. In this sense it is clearly not like Al Qaeda,...
Yesterday the Caspian Sea pipeline opened. As noted here, the $4 billion pipeline will deliver oil from Baku, Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. With the ability to pump one million barrels of oil per day, the pipeline is over a thousand miles long and is expected to supply 7 percent of the world's oil supply....
According to a little-noticed Office of the Prosecutor press release two weeks ago, the ICTR has held that the occurrence of genocide in Rwanda is a matter of "common knowledge" and will no longer have to be proven at trial: The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on 16 June 2006 ruled that the Trial Chambers must take...
° Two rockets hit Israeli city of Haifa on Thursday evening ° Israel targets Lebanon by land, air and sea: enforcing naval blockade, bombing Beirut airport and shelling Lebanese towns ° Jets bomb Lebanese army air base at Rayak and Baalbek TV transmitter in Bekaa Valley ° Shelling from both sides is heaviest over Lebanon's southern border ° Hezbollah targets Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya and...
Number of Employees in the Ministry of Fisheries: 401 Number of Employees in the Ministry of Defence: 64 ...
The breaking story is here. She alleges that Cheney, Libby, and Rove conspired to destroy her career in retaliation for her hunsband Joe Wilson’s criticisms of the Administration’s Iraq policy after his investigation into the discredited Niger nuke connection. It will be interesting to see how much the court paper read like a standard retaliation suit or whether they will turn...
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...
