In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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26 Sep

Sometimes, the U.S. government seems at odds with all of its allies. The most recent example is the battle over the Convention for the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions sponsored by UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. U.S. Ambassador to UNESCO Louise Oliver criticizes the draft treaty, and UNESCO in general, for failing...

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26 Sep

Peggy, Chris, and I are very pleased to announce that Professor Roger Alford of Pepperdine University will be joining Opinio Juris on a permanent basis. In addition to being a top-notch scholar, Roger was also a guest blogger here over the summer, contributing a number of fascinating posts from India. We are thrilled to have him as a permanent blogger.Welcome...

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25 Sep

The Cox International Center at Case Western is launching "Grotian Moment: The Saddam Trial Blog" which will bring together some of the leading scholars of international criminal law to comment on the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein. Lots of international law bigwigs will be participating and they have already had quite a few interesting posts on topics such as the...

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23 Sep

What do American astronauts, Russian rockets, and the Iranian nuclear program have in common? More than I ever realized.As it happens, the Senate approved a bill this week that would allow NASA to purchase Russian Soyuz space vehicles that could be used as a stop-gap between the end of the operational life of the shuttle fleet and the debut...

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21 Sep

Israel has had a long and often unhappy relationship with international institutions, especially the U.N. Moreover, Israel's struggle with the Palestinians and the Arab states has also given it good reasons to be suspicious of international law, especially the kind of international law used to restrain its military power. So it is not exactly surprising to see this recent decision...

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21 Sep

Transnational tribunals—mechanisms that allow sub-national actors such as individuals and companies to sue States for alleged infringements of their rights—are not only proliferating in number, they also have larger caseloads covering more substantive areas than ever before. I have just posted to SSRN an article assessing whether and how such tribunals cause normative change in the domestic legal and political...

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19 Sep

Over at Slate, Julian Mortenson has submitted a series of dispatches from the Slobadan Milosevic trial at the ICTY which offer an up-close-and-personal angle on the 3-plus-years old prosecution of the notorious Serb leader on a series of war crimes charges. International prosecution has an important part to play in accountability for past crimes, for creating a forum for victims...

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18 Sep

Here is a sympathetic profile in the WSJ of newly-installed U.N. Ambassador John Bolton's activities during the latest U.N. reform effort. Perhaps I am wrong when I argued here that U.N. ambassadors, and ambassadors in general don't matter very much. But then again, this profile doesn't really suggest Bolton has been able to do very much, one way or the...

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15 Sep

Today I will be participating in an "online symposium" hosted here by the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty (my opening statement is here). Four leading scholars (or three depending on whether I can call myself "leading"), will blog about Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a case involving a challenge to the legality of President Bush's military commissions (which I...

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