Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
15 Jul Intervention in Civil Wars and the Dangers of Legitimacy
a chaotic fashion, hence making it nearly impossible to discern the current legal framework regulating these instances, at a closer look patters emerge. Notably, the analysis conducted in my book has identified that, while the effectiveness doctrine no longer reflects the current legal framework, legitimacy is emerging as a possible alternative with regard to interventions in favour of governments and rebels alike. Specifically, the pattern suggests that human rights are being used as a parameter of legitimacy. As highlighted by the contributions to this symposium, discussions on foreign interventions trigger...
05 Aug Complementarity, Catalysts, Compliance Symposium: Two Problems of Positive Complementarity in the Context of the DRC
[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...18 Oct Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: A Reply
[Joost Pauwelyn is Professor of International Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.] Thank you to Professors David Zaring, Tai-Heng Cheng and Chris Brummer for their truly insightful and extremely helpful comments. Our book, and this discussion, is clearly only the beginning of a much longer debate on what, I predict, will turn out to be a radical transformation of the international legal system. On David’s question: Why now? Haven’t we always seen informality? Yes, but today...08 Jun The UN’s Alphabet Soup of Entities
...the Economic and Social Fields (H/T to the inimitable Hayes Brown and his UN blog.) I haven’t been blogging much on account of some family stuff, but … this is why You Need to Read My Book, Living With the UN: American Responsibilities and International Order. Among other things, the book recommends that the US simply skip all the UN conference roadshows and urge instead that their matters be taken up in the course of ordinary business. (I’ve posted the first three chapters as a sample up at SSRN, here.)...03 Oct Book Symposium Investment Law: Comments on Mary E. Footer’s Chapter
...This could also directly or indirectly influence the conceptualisation and reasoning of these experts when faced with trade matters. The trade and investment debate is most challenging and this book offers a remarkable collection of relevant essays on several dimensions of this complex relationship. There are so many difficult legal issues that need to be explored and better understood and some go to the heart of each system. For example, what is the relationship between the fundamental MFN provision of the WTO GATS and benefits included fundamentally bilateral investment treaties?...18 Jun Berman Book Discussion: Paul Berman on Global Legal Pluralism
[Paul Schiff Berman is Dean and Robert Kramer Research Professor at George Washington University Law School.] Thanks to Peter and all the other bloggers for providing an opportunity to explore the ideas in my recent book, Global Legal Pluralism. I start from the premise that we live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, supranational, and nonstate communities. Yet law often operates based on a convenient fiction that nation-states exist in...
02 Oct Terror against Jews in Germany: Reflections on Ronen Steinke’s New Book
...book addresses discrimination against “racially marginalized people” in general (“same shit, different asshole”) and is thus about an overarching “justice problem” (p. 18). Meticulously researched chronicle Anyone who believed that the National Socialist “destruction of European Jews” and the subsequent efforts at political education in the Federal Republic of Germany had noticeably reduced prejudice, even hatred, against Jews is proven wrong by Steinke: His meticulously researched chronicle of anti-Semitic violence in Germany from 1945 until January 2020 (pp. 149 et seq.) shows that the violence is primarily directed against Jewish...
17 Jun Contingency in International Law Symposium: Planned Obsolescence of International Law–On Contingency and Utopian Possibilities
...many historic and contemporary issues, is still a worthy endeavor. We are reassured that if we can find moments of contingency in which to exercise our ‘situated freedom’ (Samuel Moyn in the Conclusion) then perhaps our discipline’s future can be brighter than its past. There are also moments in the book which go against this grain, and it is at these junctures that the book really shines for me. In this piece I explore how two different authors (Umut Özsu and Moshen al Attar) engage with and work through their...05 Dec Reply to Raustiala, McGuinness, Parrish and Cleveland
I am very grateful to Kal Raustiala, Peggy McGuinness, Austen Parrish and Sarah Cleveland for taking the time to read my book – and I’m even happier that they liked it. They each make a number of important points, and I’ll now take the opportunity to respond to some of them. Kal is right in saying that one of my goals in the book was to separate preliminary, jurisdictional issues from the merits of any particular case, but that in reality such a separation is difficult to achieve. Peggy mentions...16 May Book Discussion “Outsourcing War and Peace”: Too Many Gaps – The Need for a Better Accountability Framework for Private Military and Security Contractors
time, we need better evidence-gathering in the field. It took two weeks for FBI investigators to get to Nisour Square to collect information, and ultimately it was largely the evidentiary problems that appear to have caused this case to fall apart. Thus, I also support CEJA’s provisions requiring theater-investigative units to gather evidence in cases of abuse. Finally, I will discuss in a future post, we might consider bringing contractors under the military justice system and subjecting them to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But even apart from potential...