As some human rights activists had feared, former Liberian President Charles Taylor has disappeared from his villa in Nigeria, just days after Nigeria agreed to turn him over to the new Liberian government and the Special International Sierra Leone court for war crimes. Nigeria is claiming they don't know what happened, but this certainly sounds fishy. ...
First of all, I’d like to thank Chris, Peggy, Julian, Rodger and Kevin for inviting me to join Opinio Juris. I’m looking forward to plenty of posts on the major international law issues of the day (which, today, as Julian pointed out, is the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in Hamdan). But, analogizing to the conventional-wisdom for public speakers,...
I will be speaking tomorrow in Washington at the ASIL/ITA conference on "The Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at 25: The Cases Everyone Needs to Know for Investor-State and International Arbitration." Details about the conference are available here. I served as a judicial law clerk for one of the American judges at the Tribunal in the early 1990s and...
Ariel Lavinbuk, a 3L at Yale Law, has an interesting proposal on how the Supreme Court should resolve the upcoming Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case. He argues in Slate that the Court should avoid all the hard issues as to legality of military commissions under the Constitution and international treaties. Rather, they should simply hold that even if the commissions are...
Wow. It is rare for someone in your field to write something that is so obviously important about a subject that has completely escaped your attention. But I must admit that that is how Tim Wu's draft article on The World Trade Law of Internet Filtering hit me when I read it. Fresh, thoughtful, and concise. His topic is how...
We would like to welcome the newest member of the Opinio Juris team, Professor Duncan Hollis of Temple University School of Law. As many of you may remember, Duncan guest blogged with us in December. Duncan is a specialist in treaty law and has edited a new book, National Treaty Law and Practice. Other examples of his scholarship can...
On the thirtieth anniversary of the coup in Argentina that removed Isabel Peron from power, the ever-essential National Security Archives has released a series of fascinating documents detailing the massive atrocities committed by the military junta in the wake of the coup and revealing Henry Kissinger's intent to immediately support the junta despite warnings of the impending bloodshed. The...
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear two of the most important cases on the status of treaty and international law in the U.S. system in the last fifty years. On Tuesday, Scotus will consider the petition of Hamdan, an alleged Al Qaeda member who is challenging the legality of the system of military commissions under U.S. law...
Regarding the upcoming oral argument in Hamdan, the Guantanamo detainee case before the Supreme Court, the following is from CNN (citing to Newsweek): U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed the idea that Guantanamo detainees have constitutional rights and called European concerns over the issue hypocritical, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday. The comments, which Newsweek said were recorded at a private appearance...
There is an interesting story in The Australian today reporting that Vladimir Putin not only plagiarized his economics thesis, "The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations," from two American economists at the University of Pittsburgh, but would not have earned the Ph.D in economics he claims to have even if he had written it: A new...
There is an interesting editorial by Roger Cohen in the New York Times contending that the Abdul Rahman case shows deeper fisions between the West and Islam than we typically appreciate. Cohen highlights the fact that politicians throughout the West have condemned the threatened execution of a man for the simple act of embracing another faith. He also...
Bush's string of broken promises to the victims of Hurricane Katrina are well-documented. So this story -- wherein, when faced with a choice between politics and compassion, he once again chooses politics — comes as little surprise: Cuba's prize money from the first World Baseball Classic has become a political football in President Fidel Castro's 4-decade-old sparing match with the...
