I've been settling into my digs this summer at the National Taiwan University College of Law as a visiting research fellow with the support from a grant from the Taiwan Fellowship. Mostly, I've been spending my time eating my way through what I believe is the best Chinese food scene in the world (I am posting pictures of my eating...
Three quick (and thus tentative) thoughts on the BIG news out of the Justice Department a few minutes ago, announcing criminal charges against five officers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army for hacking various U.S. industries, including Westinghouse and US Steel. The Justice Department offered fairly detailed descriptions of how the hackers obtained information that had direct economic consequences for US companies, whether in...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa West African leaders agreed to work together to wage "total war" on Boko Haram saying the Nigerian Islamist group had become a regional al Qaeda that threatened all of them. Mali sent in troops to retake Kidal from Tuareg separatists, with the government claiming it is "at war"...
Call for Papers The Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law will sponsor a Scholars’ Roundtable on October 10, 2014 at Brooklyn Law School. Scholars writing in a diverse range of fields related to international business law are invited to submit proposals to present works in progress for an intense day of discussion with other scholars in the field. ...
This week on Opinio Juris, the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics brought you a symposium on Professor Jedidiah J. Kroncke’s article Property Rights, Labor Rights and Democratization: Lessons From China and Experimental Authoritarians. In their comments, Cynthia Estlund looked at parallels with the US, Eva Pils pointed to a discrepancy in transnational civil society's concern for labour and evictee rights in China, and John...
[Naz Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement Project at Harvard Law School. This post is written in her personal capacity and does not represent the views of the CHE Project] Part 1 can be found here. Humanitarian Concerns Perhaps as significant as the legal errors in the letter, the authors seem to take no account of the security implications of their recommendation....
“Based on the opinion of prominent international lawyers, the UN currently has the mandate and legal authority to organize a large coalition of international NGOs poised to deliver humanitarian aid to all areas of Syria. Anything short implies complicity with the Syrian government’s continued violations of the basic principles of international law, and is shameful.”Strong words—and ones that raise the question of whether the prominent international lawyers who signed the letter anticipated being implicated in the suggestion that the UN’s failure to essentially run the Syrian border against the government’s explicit denial of consent suggests “complicity with the Syrian government’s continued violations.” There are many actors with blood on their hands in the generational tragedy unfolding in Syria. In my view, the women and men of the UN’s humanitarian agencies are not on that list. In this post, I would like to provide a close initial read of the letter (whose arguments have been quickly amplified by an advocacy and media campaigns). My sense is that this is a political argument dressed up in the language of IHL.
As my correspondent Victoria Ferauge points out in response to last week's post on inter-governmental agreements implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, the problem with FATCA for expatriate Americans is not so much the prospect of added accountant fees in tax preparation. It's the prospect of being discriminated against as an American for all things financial. Faced with their own accounting...
The state of the international law academy in the United States is undoubtedly strong. International law and its progeny are no longer marginalized pieces of the law school curriculum as they were for much of the 20th century. U.S. Law Schools regularly offer international law, with a fair number now doing so in the first year (whether as a required...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Boko Haram has released a new video claiming to show the missing Nigerian schoolgirls who were abducted last month, alleging they had converted to Islam and would not be released until all of its prisoners held by Nigeria were freed. Israel offered Nigeria help in locating 200 schoolgirls abducted...
A busy week on Opinio Juris with a book symposium on Just Post Bellum-Mapping the Normative Foundations. Kristen introduced the great definitional debate on the meaning of "just post bellum" (JPB). Jens Iversion contrasted JPB with transitional justice and Ruti Teitel discussed JPB as transitional justice. Jens Ohlin argued in his post that ideas about omission liability are stumbling blocks towards the acceptance of JPB. Where...
