While on the train to Bangalore this morning I read an especially bad op-ed piece in the Hindu on what is wrong with the United States. Money quote:"After the invasion of Iraq, the collective punishment of Fallujah, the abuses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, the reckless insistence on the right to pollute the planet and the systematic asset-stripping of...
Suzanne Nossel over at Democracy Arsenal has posted this excellent analysis about why the US House of Representatives' current move (voted out of the International Relations Committee Wednesday) to condition or withhold US dues to the UN will be counter-productive. It includes a lot of detail about the US dues crisis of the late 1990s and how then-US Ambassador to...
I have long found it curious that those who favor constitutional comparativism often fail to appreciate the particular cultural distinctives that imbue different legal systems. It is rare that comparative scholars will outline those differences, many of whom wish to deny that they exist or diminish their importance.It was therefore of great interest to me today when I came across...
I am back on the blog after some out-of-town travel and have been reading with great interest Roger Alford's dispatches from India. Welcome, Roger! I've also been catching up with developments this past week. On June 6, the ICC Chief Prosecutor announced that the ICC would officially open an investigation into the situation in Darfur. This comes after the Security...
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in his new book The World is Flat, argues that the global playing field is being leveled and that as a result the world is now flat. He argues that, “it is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on a more equal...
There have been numerous posts on Opinio Juris concerning how it may be time to reconsider the role of the ICJ. One recent comment to the blog and another “out in the real world” provide a good counterpoint to this whole discussion.Dr. Cesare Romano of NYU has posted an insightful comment to an earlier post on whether the ICJ needs...
According to the ILO, today in the world there are 20 million people (i.e., the population of Texas) who are currently in bonded labor. Bonded labor is a variation of forced labor that is little discussed and only vaguely understood by most Westerners. In its typical manifestation, bonded labor occurs when credit is advanced to an impoverished person and then...
I think you will get conflicting views on your question. My hunch is that as a general rule the lawyers litigating human rights cases in Indian courts are motivated by international human rights norms but typically will argue domestic law to the judges, with healthy reference to persuasive authority from English courts. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to...
Welcome Roger and thanks for starting us off this week with a great topic.IJM’s strategy is very interesting. While I don’t know of other groups applying litigation strategy exactly like IJM, I do note that U.S. civil rights groups have looked into ways in which human rights norms can affect U.S. litigation, even if you are not suing under...
Thank you Julian, Chris, and Peggy for the opportunity to guest blog this week with Opinio Juris. I am writing from Chennai (Madras) India, a south Indian city teeming with 4.2 million residents, a quarter of whom are slum dwellers. I spent most of my first day here touring the city by car, overwhelmed by the masses of...
OK, I'm not quite signing off yet. I just wanted to point readers to two more sharp (and in my mind, devastating) attacks on Amnesty International's attempt to equate Guantanamo with "gulags". (A comparison that they have not backed away from, as Jon Adler notes here). One is by Kenneth Anderson in the Weekly Standard, and the other...
Opinio Juris is thrilled to welcome Professor Roger Alford, of Pepperdine University School of Law, as a guest-blogger, filling in (mostly) for me while I travel and catch up on a few other projects. Roger will be posting from India, where he is currently travelling for the next two weeks. Roger is a well-known scholar of foreign relations and private...
