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Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

05 Aug

[Jacques B. Mbokani is a Professor of Law at the Université de Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a Consultant to Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. A French version, provided by the author, appears below the English version of this post.] Introduction Christian De Vos’s book on Complementarity, Catalysts, Compliance takes a fresh look at the relationship between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and national courts involved in the fight against crimes under the jurisdiction of the ICC. When one reads this book carefully, one cannot help noticing...
05.08.20 | |

17 May

This is the third day in our discussion of Professor Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Links to the related posts can be found below. Following-up on my earlier post on the difficulty of changing contracting practices by executive agencies, I thought I’d highlight a few quotes from a January 2011 NY Times article about Dewey Clarridge. Clarridge has had a long and storied career in and out of the CIA. He (proudly) claims responsibility for having the idea to...
17.05.12 | |

14 Nov

...commentary. However, Erin Pobjie notes, cases at the “lower end of the intensity spectrum” present serious difficulties insofar state authorities are usually reluctant to position themselves where both the facts and the law are deeply uncertain. (In turn, most institutional and academic efforts have been concerned with the notion of an armed attack, a subset of all the violations of the prohibition to use force, given its momentous implications, most notably the fact that it unlocks an armed response in self-defense.) The book thereby develops a framework to better account...
14.11.24 | |

24 Apr

[Yasmine Nahlawi is an independent researcher specialising in R2P and its applicability to the Syrian and Libyan conflicts. She holds a PhD in Public International Law from Newcastle University, LLM in International Legal Studies from Newcastle University, and BSc in Political Science from Eastern Michigan University.] I would like to begin my response post by expressing my deepest gratitude to the distinguished reviewers of my book, Shannon Raj Singh, Anjali Manivannan, and Jessica Peake, for bringing in their diverse and insightful perspectives while reviewing ‘The Responsibility to Protect in Libya...
24.04.20 | |

10 Dec

...the things that my readers already know are true. But above all, I am just writing a history of international law (laughs). Is your new book a response to your oeuvre? Is it a continuation of how you were thinking before? We are the narrators of our lives but not the final authorities on them. Other people narrate our lives differently, and maybe with more insight. I am older than I was with those previous books, and old men write history (all laugh). But the first book was a really...
10.12.18 | |

24 Jun

...a long way towards convincing me, but there are some other implications and cavils worth noting: I view this as an (already!) seminal contribution to how comparative law and the transplant process works. But the book has important prescriptions for international law as well, as Linos shows in her conclusion. For one thing, it justifies the efforts to pass global conventions, even nonbinding ones pointing to best practices: endorsements from international organizations can leverage political support for world-bettering policies. Second, where some view international law as rather undemocratic, the story...
24.06.13 | |

12 Dec

[Mohamed S. Helal is an Assistant Professor of Law, Moritz College of Law & Faculty Affiliate, Mershon Center for International Security Studies – The Ohio State University.] Introduction Dr. John Heieck’s A Duty to Prevent Genocide: Due Diligence Obligations Among the P5 is a lucid, well-argued, and extensively researched book. It is essential reading for academics and practitioners who have an interest in various areas of Public International Law, including jus ad bellum, international criminal law, and state responsibility. The core argument of this book is that all states are...
12.12.18 | |

05 Feb

Let me begin by saying that God and Gold is an ambitious book. According to Walter Russell Mead, the book is not about history, but about the meaning of history. What is the overarching plot of world history? Mead argues that history is best viewed from the perspective of Anglo-American power. He writes, “It is not too much to say that the last four hundred years of world history can be summed up in ten letters. As leadership in the maritime order shifted from the United Provinces of the Netherlands...
05.02.08 | |

26 Feb

I wanted to flag for readers an on-line discussion that we are planning for next Monday-Wednesday, March 2-4. We will be pleased to host Richard Gardiner (University College London) for a discussion of his book, Treaty Interpretation. In addition to comments by the regular contributors, we will have several distinguished guest bloggers, all of whom know a thing or two about treaties: Isabelle van Damme (Clare College, Cambridge), Malgosia Fitzmaurice (University of London, Queen Mary), and Jan Klabbers (Helsinki). Among the potential topics will be discussion of the continuing vitality...
26.02.09 | |

16 Sep

[Richard H. Steinberg is Professor of Law at the University of California. Los Angeles; Visiting Professor of International, Comparative & Area Studies at Stanford University; and Director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project.] I am grateful for Ian Hurd’s thoughtful comment on my book chapter partly because it supports my claim that that everyone borrows from the realist tradition. Moreover, Hurd’s comment inadvertently recapitulates a narrow structural realist view of international law (recalling the associated dysfunctional debate of the 1980s) that I intended my chapter to supersede, offering...
16.09.13 | |

01 Aug

Opinio Juris is proud to host an online symposium on Michael Ramsey’s new book The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs recently published by Harvard University Press. We are especially pleased to have Professor Ramsey with us to discuss his book because it is, in my humble opinion, the most important monograph on U.S. foreign relations law in the past decade (one might even say, without hyperbole, that it is the most important U.S. foreign relations book of this century!). Not since Professor Louis Henkin’s seminal treatise, Foreign Affairs and the...
01.08.07 | |

16 Feb

[John Coyle is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. This is the sixth post in our symposium this week on treaty supremacy.] In his wonderful new book, The Death of Treaty Supremacy, David Sloss provides a highly readable and immaculately researched account of treaty supremacy doctrine. Although the book offers original insights into a great many topics—including the process of invisible constitutional change—I found its detailed taxonomy of the various versions of the doctrine of non-self-executing treaties to be particularly compelling. Whereas previous scholars...
16.02.17 | |