In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Trade & Economic Law

17 May

As the smear campaign against Richard Goldstone gets ever more desperate, it seems opportune to provide a bit more information about Israel's support for apartheid, to which Goldstone's pales in comparison.  Here is Sasha Polokow-Suransky again, this time responding to attacks on Goldstone by the Speaker of the Knesset and Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister: Goldstone's apartheid-era judicial rulings are undoubtedly a...

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13 May

I was going to wait until the book -- entitled The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa -- came out to mention it, but now seems like an opportune time.  You can pre-order the book from Amazon here, and here is the description: A revealing account of how Israel’s booming arms industry and apartheid South Africa’s international...

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13 May

I will write in more detail when I have a bit more time, but I can't let Dershowitz's ridiculously slanted and ahistorical attack on Richard Goldstone pass without comment.  Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a Senior Editor at Foreign Affairs who is an expert on Israel-South Africa relations, has responded to the allegations made in the Yediot Ahronoth story Dershowitz cites, allegations that...

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07 May

Yesterday a federal court in New York granted Chevron's request for discovery of outtakes from the 2009 documentary Crude about the multi-billion dollar litigation in Ecuador. Chevron's request was pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1782, which authorizes a judge in the United States to order discovery of evidence to be used in proceedings before a foreign tribunal. As reported here, Chevron's...

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04 May

Kudos to Northwestern's Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth for a wonderful conference on ATS litigation last week. The papers by David Scheffer & Caroline Kaeb, John McGinnis & Ilya Somin, Jide Nzelibe, Michael Barsa & David Dana, Anthea Roberts, and Eugene Kontorovich were all outstanding. There are many topics worthy of retelling, but I wanted...

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27 Apr

When I teach International Trade, one of my favorite parts of the class is the discussion of trade linkages. How does a state balance competing concerns such as labor, the environment, and human rights? Typically the WTO accommodates those concerns through the General Exceptions that permit a state to violate the WTO rules if doing so is, say,...

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17 Apr

It's been 18 days since I asked NGO Monitor to provide the same detailed accounting of their funding that they demand of the human-rights groups they so regularly malign and demonize.  Readers will be shocked -- shocked! -- to know that the organization has ignored my request, in keeping with its profoundly hypocritical approach to funding. In the meantime, of course,...

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09 Apr

The results of this new study about the ineffectiveness of international aid to certain developing countries is not surprising, but it is still depressing. For years, the international community has forked over billions in health aid, believing the donations supplemented health budgets in poor countries. It now turns out development money prompted some governments to spend on entirely different things, which...

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31 Mar

NGO Monitor loves to criticize progressive NGOs for a lack of transparency concerning their funding.  A recent report, for example, predictably attacks Human Rights Watch for not identifying all of its donors, particularly those at last year's fundraising event in Saudi Arabia: HRW publishes the names and amounts provided by some of its donors, but others remain hidden. Although HRW...

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30 Mar

Yesterday's oral argument in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd gave strong indications that the Court was prepared to extend the territorial limitations of Hoffman-La Rouche v. Empagran to the securities fraud context. Morrison involves a class action brought by foreign plaintiffs against a foreign stock issuer on a foreign exchange for alleged fraud that occurred on foreign soil....

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26 Mar

Every time that I teach international criminal law, at least one student writes on whether you could prosecute the Burmese junta for crimes against humanity.  As a matter of substantive ICL, the answer is clearly yes.  The problem is jurisdictional -- who is going to prosecute them?  Apparently, the UK thinks it should be the ICC via a Security Council...

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