I’m fascinated by the recent story that volcanic activity has produced an actual, new island in the South Pacific near Tonga. The sailors who claim to be the first to have “discovered” this new land mass have pretty amazing photos of the island and the “pumice raft” that accompanied its creation. Scientists are having a field day assessing...
Mary Dudziak has started up a new legal history blog. Mary has done terrific work of interest to those of us in foreign relations law, especially her book situating the civil rights movement in the international context of the Cold War. Welcome to the blogosphere! ...
This semester I took Peter Spiro's suggestion to heart and assigned my international law students to write a Wikipedia entry as a small part of their class requirements. The only limits I put on the students was to pick a topic that was relevant to international law and that was not currently included in Wikipedia (or at most was...
Some prominent coverage in the last couple of days of Nicaragua's recent enactment of a total prohibition on abortion - see front page stories here and here in the Boston Globe and Washington Post. The reports suggest plans to take the law to the Inter-American Commission and the UN Human Rights Council. The WaPo story also mentions protests...
Here’s one international law development that did not appear in the headlines (are you surprised?). On October 25, 2006, the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) Commission on Banking Practice and Technique (Banking Commission) voted unanimously to approve the UCP (Uniform Customs and Practices) 600, punctuating a 3 ½ year effort to revise the universally followed “rules of the road”...
When I am reviewing developments regarding international law to report here on Opinio Juris, I regularly have to separate the wheat from the chaff. For every case I report about an interesting international law development there are a dozen others that I entertain. Those dog cases are surprisingly interesting and sometimes humorous. They provide a unique insight...
It's been a difficult week for the new Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which is supposed to begin work in early 2007. First, an important meeting of the ECCC's Cambodian and international judges failed to reach agreement on the Tribunal's rules, which govern every aspect of its administration, including investigation procedures, trial motions, and appeals. ...
A judge in France has issued a series of arrest warrants against current high-level Rwandan government officials alleging they were involved in the 1994 assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, the assassination that many believe sparked the eventual genocide by Hutus against the Rwandan Tutsi minority. This isn't a case involving international human rights law directly. Rather the French judge is...
We have certain images in our minds about that first Thanksgiving. It usually involves bountiful harvests, amicable relations with the Indians, and prayerful thanksgiving to Providence for his manifold blessings. Well, it wasn't quite that simple. Although there are various versions of the "first Thanksgiving," one event that has a strong claim to it occurred at Plymouth,...
If true, this is fantastic news:Strong hints have emerged that the Vatican is preparing to change its policy on the use of condoms in the fight against Aids, after a 200-page study on the question, commissioned by the Pope, was passed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for consideration. "This is something that worries the Pope a lot,"...
There’s been lots of recent buzz suggesting that the U.S. might start “talking with the enemy” (a.k.a. Iran). I suspect folks favoring such talks will groan when they hear CNN’s story of how an Iranian court is prepared to hand over the U.S. embassy in Tehran to an Iranian man, Hossein Alikhani, who successfully sued the United States in...
[Opinio Juris has requested David Sloss' permission to post this email he published on a international law list serve and he has kindly obliged] I finally was able to read the Texas court’s decision in Medellin. It strikes me that the court almost completely ignored the strongest argument in favor of the petitioner. That argument can be summarized as...
