In his Roundtable Post, Kal Raustiala raises questions relating to one important aspect of the design of international tribunals: who get's the ball rolling, or in other words - who has standing and the right to bring a suit to the tribunal. I agree with his basic distinction between private actors as "fire alarms" (or whistle blowers) and states as...
When we talk about international law and U.S. federal courts, we do so most often in the context of national courts as an alternative to international tribunals. But it is also possible to conceive of U.S. federal law, which is now the principal business of U.S. federal courts, as a system of supra-state law supreme over state law, in...
Student blogger (and budding future law professor and regular Opinio Juris reader) David Schraub has an exclusive two-part interview with Tom Friedman. You can read the interviews over at The Debate Link here and here. Plenty of insights regarding the Middle East, Lebanon, Iraq, the Bush Administration, and the future of "liberal hawks" in the Democratic...
I know that some other international law professors are using this blog as a study aid for their public international law classes. And many of those law professors are using the Dunoff, Ratner and Wippman book, International Law: Norms, Actors, Process. So I wanted to raise a minor issue that came to mind today as I was...
What do Formula-One racing and international law have in common? A little bit more than they used to. Consider the following from the BBC:Cyprus is making an official complaint to motor sport's world governing body over what it calls a political "trick" at the Turkish Grand Prix. The Turkish Cypriot leader, Mehmet Ali Talat, presented the Formula One...
Having done no empirical work on the subject whatsoever, I have no idea whether there are any real world cases that fit this theory. However, at least in theory, one plausible reason for empowering new institutions is to dissipate accountability and thereby centralize, rather than dissipate power. This, for example, is the reason that politicians frequently empower "blue...
Larry Helfer's post on the creation of new international tribunals presents the puzzle of why states create so many new institutions when they could, in theory, use existing institutions. I suspect that he is right that part of the answer is a desire to create more focused and technically expert tribunals. But perhaps states also desire more closely controlled tribunals...
It is by now old news that litigation above the level of the nation state has expanded exponentially over the last fifteen years. This expansion appears in three distinct forms. First, states have established more than a dozen new international courts and tribunals during that time period. Second, states are recognizing the jurisdiction of new and existing...
Actually, contrary to Professor Heller's explanation for HRW's behavior ("given the brevity of HRW's visit to Sreifa on July 31, the researchers would not have had time to interview residents to determine whether Hezbollah fighters had moved into the area; they would only have had time to determine whether there were any visible manifestations of their presence"), Human Rights Watch...
Professor Bell's latest post is extremely unfortunate. Instead of addressing his failure to quote HRW's sentence in its entirety, he not only spins the sentence to somehow support his criticism of the organization, he does so by subtly imputing that criticism to me: If Professor Heller believes that HRW is capable of having seen plausible signs of Hezbollah presence in...
Professor Heller insists that it is "excruciatingly clear" that the NYT sentence that reads "Mr. Kamaleldin, the Sreifa official, estimated that up to two-thirds of the town's homes and buildings were demolished, leaving more than 43 people buried in the rubble" refers to casualties from the August 13 attack alone. Perhaps it is clear to Professor Heller. For the rest of us,...
Once again Professor Bell misstates the August 16 New York Times article on which his argument about Hezbollah fighters depends. The article makes it excruciatingly clear that "43 people" refers not to the total number of casualties in Sreifa during the war, but to the number of casualties in the August 13 attack alone: Just days ago, Israeli warplanes pounded...
