General

Lethal Drone Strikes — Not Just for American Citizens Any More!

Not surprisingly, drone strikes that kill American citizens have received the most attention in the press. So it's important to emphasize that the US kills citizens of its allies, as well, such as the two Australians recently vaporized in Yemen: TWO Australian citizens have been killed in a US airstrike in Yemen in what is the first known example of Australian...

Weekend Roundup: June 7 – 13, 2014

This week on Opinio Juris, Kevin had a chuckle at Libya's newest excuse why it missed the deadline for filing submissions to the ICC. He also called your attention to the work of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli NGO collecting testimonials from IDF on the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Deborah discussed ongoing confusion between al Qaeda and ISIS, and the...

An End-of-War Policy Diversion

Since I’ve given the New York Times grief in the past about using the name “Al Qaeda” to refer to non-Al Qaeda radical Islamist groups, I wanted to give them due credit for yesterday’s piece describing the takeover of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as having been accomplished by Sunni militants. The Times piece...

Weekly News Wrap: Monday, June 9, 2014

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa A Liberia-flagged oil tanker has gone missing off the coast of Ghana and a senior port official told Reuters on Saturday the captain sent a distress call to say the vessel was attacked by pirates.  Up to 37 people including women and children were killed in Democratic Republic...

Weekend Roundup: May 24 – June 6, 2014

This fortnight on Opinio Juris, we discussed the US Supreme Court's decision in Bond v United States. Peter argued how the Court ducked the question about the federal treaty power and provided a Bond cheat sheet. A guest post by Jean Galbraith focused on the notable silences in the Bond opinions, and David Golove and Marty Lederman described the outcome as stepping back...

Executive Director Search at the American Society of International Law

As many readers of this blog know, Elizabeth Andersen, the  Executive Director of the American Society of International Law, has been named the new director of the American Bar Association's Rule of Law Initiative. Consequently, the ASIL has a search underway for a new Executive Director. The search announcement states, in part: The American Society of International Law (“ASIL” or “the...

High Level Sanctions Review Launched at the UN

A new High Level sanctions review has been initiated at the UN, sponsored by the UN Missions of Australia, Finland, Greece and Sweden, in combination with Brown University and the sanctions consulting firm CCI. The purpose of the review is to assess existing sanctions and develop forward looking recommendations to enhance effectiveness. A similar process took place in 2006, known...

Bond Cheat Sheet

As David Kaye notes, treaty-power advocates everywhere may be breathing a collective sigh of relief with the Supreme Court's decision in Bond v. United States. I'm not so sure how big a difference it makes, given the Senate's persistent refusal to put an expansive treaty power to work. From an academic perspective the decision is a big let-down. No big...

Guest Post: Silences in the Bond Case

[Jean Galbraith is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers School of Law - Camden] Thank you to Opinio Juris for letting me guest blog on Bond. The most notable thing about the Bond decision is a resounding silence.  As a matter of law, it should have been easy to find for the government.  The statutory text reads plainly in the government’s favor, and constitutional text, practice, and precedent easily support the conclusion that the federal government can override federalism interests in implementing constitutionally valid treaties.  Yet not a single justice sided with the United States.  This silence is particularly perplexing given that three justices at oral argument seemed sympathetic to the government. That is the major silence, but there are silences of reasoning in the opinions as well.  In what follows, I focus on two silences.  The first is the lack of consideration in the majority opinion of how treaty-implementing statutes might differ as a matter of statutory construction from ordinary statutes.  The second is the startling absence of constitutional history from the Framing onward in Justice Scalia’s concurrence.

The Majority Opinion

As Peter Spiro has noted, the majority ducks the constitutional question of whether the Treaty Power plus the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to criminalize domestic poisonings like that of Ms. Bond.  Following a hint dropped by Justice Kennedy at oral argument, the Court does this by holding that there needs to be a “clear statement that Congress meant the statute to reach local criminal conduct.”  It isn’t enough for Congress to use broad language that seems to cover the act at issue; instead, Congress apparently has to do something more to signal specific intent to reach “local” conduct.  Congress didn’t do so here, so Ms. Bond wins. I won’t deconstruct the merits of this approach, although I think Justice Scalia does a good job in his concurrence of showing why it is problematic.  But I do want to mention that it leads to an interesting divergence between the interpretation of a treaty and the interpretation of implementing legislation.  The Court spent very little time on the interpretation of the Chemical Weapons Convention itself, merely noting its “doubts” that the Convention was meant to reach ordinary domestic poisonings.  If it had wanted to, the Court could doubtless have done more to interpret the Convention this way (e.g., by explicit discussion of “object and purpose” or perhaps by drawing on rule-of-lenity-related principles in international and comparative law).  But instead the Court accepted a wedge between the interpretation of a treaty and of its implementing legislation.  Federalism principles do not matter to treaty interpretation (given that these principles are country-specific) but do matter to the interpretation of implementing legislation.  If this canon of construction is about Congressional intent, then it strikes me as odd, because there is a countervailing consideration not mentioned by the Court. This is that when Congress uses language that closely tracks a treaty’s language in implementing the treaty, Congress presumably does so because it wants convergence rather than divergence with the treaty.

Justice Scalia’s Concurrence