Harvard law prof and former Bush Administration chief of the Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith has a clever op-ed in the Washington Post today recommending that the U.S. support a Security Council referral of the Darfur atrocities to the ICC. Why clever? Because, as Goldsmith explains, the U.S. can support a referral to the ICC here because it...
For public international law types, East Asia is a relatively barren place. There are no regional international tribunals and barely any regional international organizations of any importance. It is interesting to compare East Asia to, say, the Andean Community in Latin America, or the African Union. There is simply no suggestion or hint of any aspirations toward...
For those interested in following the law and politics of the European Union, two blogs of note: Duke Law School Professor Francesca Bignami’s EU Law Web Log is a great place to keep up on Commission decisions, European Court of Justice judgments and other EU happenings. Also, as LawPundit pointed out, Swedish EU Commissioner Margot Wallstrom has started her own...
Following up on our posts here, here, and here on the Breyer-Scalia discussion on foreign law and constitutional interpretation, Seth Tillman, a clerk on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals who has published widely on a variety of topics (see here), points out that Breyer may even have offered a foreign policy justification for citing foreign law. He writes, I...
From the “The More Things Change….” Dept: CNN has picked up a story from AP about the recently declassified documents of a Nixon and Ford-era Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism. The Committee, which included Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers, and included the input of Rudolf Giuliani, who was at the time an Associate Deputy Attorney General in...
Although this judgment was released a few days ago, it is still worth noting that a federal district court in New York this week issued a ruling in a mammoth civil suit by family members of September 11 victims against various entities for the attacks. The most important defendant to be dismissed on the grounds of sovereign immunity are various...
Just to prove that I am willing to criticize rightward as well as left, my target du jour is Professor John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia Law School, who published a blistering column in Slate yesterday slamming the D.C. Circuit for dismissing a lawsuit by U.S. soldiers who had suffered mistreatment and abuse in Iraq as prisoners of...
This week the Legal Affairs Debate Club hosted an interesting discussion between Eric Posner and Oona Hathaway on the value of international law. The central issue explored: If international courts and tribunals have been such a failure, why do states keep creating and joining them? ...
I'm no fan of the ICC, but it is still worthwhile to keep an eye on what it is up to. Thus far, the ICC is fairly dormant, although they do have a few referrals arising out of the various conflicts in Africa. The ICC announced yesterday the assignment of this case from the Central African Republic to a...
Chris's colleague Timothy Zick has posted an article ,"Are The States Sovereign?" (January 2005). Washington University Law Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 1, May 2005. The article analyzes the sovereignty of the states of the Union through the lens of international relations theory. This certainly sounds like an interesting approach to a devilishly complicated problem. Although IR theory is not usually...
Like Kenneth Anderson, it's taken a while for me to digest the Breyer-Scalia "conversation" on foreign law and constitutional interpretation from last week. As I hinted at earlier, I was disappointed with Breyer's comments because they simply offered no coherent rationale for why he feels it necessary or useful to cite foreign law when interpreting the Constitution. I'm sorry, Peggy,...
I'm a big fan of Harold Koh, who was one of my professors in law school, because he serves as a great role model for all law students interested in international law, government service, and legal academia. That said, I find one important element of his critique very unconvincing. Let me put aside his arguments about whether the controversial August 1,...
