Let me try to unpack several of the assertions Julian made in his argument that the UN ambassadorship (wait, all ambassadorships!) is “irrelevant.”Does the job of UN ambassador matter? It matters on two levels. First, it matters to the foreign policy making process as much as the President decides it will matter. Over the years, some presidents have made it...
I don't really understand why Bolton's nomination (and now recess appointment) has drawn so much criticism and, for that matter, why conservatives are so excited about his nomination. Bolton appears to be a smart, experienced, conservative guy. He isn't going to figuratively blow up the U.N., but he isn't going to go out of his way to be nice to...
President Bush has appointed John Bolton in a recess appointment. CNN's story is here. The BBC has a report here.While President Bush has gotten his way with the Bolton nomination, despite not being able to muster the 60 votes needed to break the filibuster, this is likely to be a Pyrrhic victory at best. With the looming free-for-all this fall...
Despite my lame attempt to make my blogging hiatus mysterious, I’ve decided to admit that I’ve spent the last two weeks in the least foreign foreign country that exists in the world for most Americans: Canada. Indeed, for many foreigners, Canadians and Americans have indistinguishable accents and might as well be compatriots (an idea that I’ve broached previously here ).To...
Yesterday's dispatch from Elizabeth reads, in part, like a section of an amicus brief for future constitutional challenges against state laws in the US banning gay marriage -- a section that might be called "European and North American Practices in Protecting the Rights of Same-Sex Couples." It certainly goes a long way to demonstrating that the nations that share our...
In addition to the vote on Schengen/Dublin discussed previously, the Swiss also voted on June 5 to allow registered partnerships, providing same-sex couples with some of the rights of marriage. Fifty-eight percent of voters and nineteen of twenty-six cantons voted yes. I admit I was somewhat surprised by the support for this measure, given Switzerland’s longstanding social conservatism....
Marty Lederman has this excellent analysis and the full text of the finally released JAG memos at Balkinization. What do the memos represent? The military lawyers on the United States vigourously objected to analysis by the Dept of Justice that the President is not bound by the Geneva Conventions -- or domestic criminal statutes -- when...
One of the items on the agenda for US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's meetings today with the new Iraqi leadership was the future legal status of US forces, either under an extension of the current UN Security Council resolution authorizing the US presence or a new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US and Iraq. Both would create immunity...
Douglas Burgess has this take in Legal Affairs. He argues the Declaration of Paris offers a good model for a potential international treaty defining the crime of terrorism:TO UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL OF DEFINING TERRORISM as a species of piracy, consider the words of the 16th-century jurist Alberico Gentili's De jure belli: "Pirates are common enemies, and they are attacked...
To relatively little notice, the proposed European Constitution has garnered several more approvals this summer, following the well-publicized French and Dutch rejections in late May/early June. Latvia, Cyprus and Malta ratified it by parliamentary vote on June 2, June 30, and July 6, respectively. And, in the first popular referendum since the French and Dutch elections, on July 10 voters...
I want to welcome Elizabeth Kandravy Cassidy to Opinio Juris. Elizabeth is an American attorney currently living in Geneva who will offer a comparativist perspective to our musings. She has taught comparative and constitutional law overseas (Univ. of Namibia) and employment, gender and family law in the US (Princeton and Seton Hall). Over the next two weeks she will be...
For months, the Bush administration has relied on its own legal analysis (bolstered now by the DC Circuit's opinion in Hamdan) that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to detainees in Guantanamo. Nonetheless, President Bush claimed in 2002 that, despite this legal conclusion, all detainees in custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere would be treated "humanely" and consistent with the principles...
