Charles Taylor, the ex-Liberian leader wanted for war crimes by the Sierra Leone International Court, has been apprehended and transferred to Liberia, the BBC reports. This comes just after President Bush threatened to call off a meeting with the Nigerian leader. The politics of this is no doubt quite murky and will continue to be murky once he gets...
Read this interesting summary by Jeff Jarvis of a speech by Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian. In his speech, Rusbridger is questioning the very future of newspapers. “I love newspapers...
The relentless Ariel Lavinbuk files this report after spending the day at the Supreme Court observing the oral argument today in Hamdan (and then scrambling back up to New Haven to get back to school). The argument he made in Slate yesterday, the Pocket Part, and of course, here on Opinio Juris, was discussed at length today by the...
While I've been obsessively focused on the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of Hamdan, the ICJ has continued plowing through its hearings on Bosnia's case alleging Serbia's responsibility for genocide. As I noted earlier, the ICJ had imposed a weird non-disclosure requirement on those attending its witness testimony this past week. That requirement was lifted today and the hearing...
CSpan has the Hamdan oral argument going. [Actually, the oral argument is best found here at the Georgetown Law School website]. I've been listening to parts of the Katyal argument and he actually invested a substantial amount of time in the argument Ariel Lavinbuk* has been making and we've been discussing here: whether conspiracy is a permissible violation of...
There is an important story developing in Germany about bloggers acting as "whistleblowers" for corporate misconduct. The issue has captured the German blogosphore, with the offending organization, Transparency International, now the top search request on Technorati. The story has been ignored in the MSM and the English blogosphere, but the details are available here. The short version is that a single...
The ubiquitous Neal Katyal, a lawprof at Georgetown, is currently completing his oral argument at the Supreme Court on behalf of Hamdan. In addition to be Hamdan's counsel of record, Katyal is a well-known legal scholar who presented a paper just this last weekend at the Yale Law symposium on executive power. He also has a very readable pragmatic...
In anticipation of its 100th Annual Meeting, the ASIL has debuted an interactive project on its website called International Law: 100 Ways it Shapes Our Lives. I think it’s a great idea. We often get so caught up in the cynicism around hot political issues that we forget that international law is like an iceberg, we simply don’t see the...
To no one's surprise, the Serbian government has finally admitted, after years of denials, that a group of nearly 50 military and intelligence officials conpsired to help Ratko Mladic avoid capture. Some of the officials have been reassigned or fired, and the Serbian government insists that "the noose is tightening" around Mladic. Serbia better hope so. As I've noted...
As some human rights activists had feared, former Liberian President Charles Taylor has disappeared from his villa in Nigeria, just days after Nigeria agreed to turn him over to the new Liberian government and the Special International Sierra Leone court for war crimes. Nigeria is claiming they don't know what happened, but this certainly sounds fishy. ...
First of all, I’d like to thank Chris, Peggy, Julian, Rodger and Kevin for inviting me to join Opinio Juris. I’m looking forward to plenty of posts on the major international law issues of the day (which, today, as Julian pointed out, is the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in Hamdan). But, analogizing to the conventional-wisdom for public speakers,...
I will be speaking tomorrow in Washington at the ASIL/ITA conference on "The Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at 25: The Cases Everyone Needs to Know for Investor-State and International Arbitration." Details about the conference are available here. I served as a judicial law clerk for one of the American judges at the Tribunal in the early 1990s and...
