Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
17 Mar Weekend Roundup: March 10-16, 2012
...the ATS. Kevin Heller revisited his post on the legality of preventive self-defense. From Monday onwards, Opinio Juris brought you a book symposium on the recent book by Professor Tai-Heng Cheng of New York Law School, When International Law Works: Realistic Idealism After 9/11 and the Global Recession. Tai-Heng Cheng introduced his book here. Julian Ku described the main argument of the book in a “short bloggish description” as We should follow formal, positive international law most of time, except when we shouldn’t. In those cases, we should find a...11 Sep Jennifer Daskal Reviews Michael Scharf and Paul Williams’ Book on the Office of Legal Adviser
Our esteemed guest blogger Michael Scharf and my Washington College of Law colleague Paul Williams brought out a very interesting volume from Cambridge UP last year, Shaping Foreign Policy in Times of Crisis: The Role of International Law and the State Department Legal Adviser. Over at Lawfare, Jennifer Daskal, friend to many of us from her days at Human Rights Watch and the last couple of years at the Justice Department, and currently a Georgetown fellow, reviews the book. (PS: And congratulations to Jen on her new baby, now a...05 Feb The Anglo-American World Order
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...24 Apr Alter Book Symposium: Comment by Jacob Katz Cogan
[Jacob Katz Cogan is the Judge Joseph P. Kinneary Professor of Law at the University of Cincinatti College of Law] At the beginning of the fourth chapter of her new book The New Terrain of International Law: Courts, Politics, Rights, Karen Alter asks: “why [are] there . . . more international courts today than at any point in history”? (112). It is an interesting and important question. Seeking to “provide[] a partial explanation for the trends” in the proliferation during the past twenty-five years of the “new-style international courts” (which...
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...17 May Book Discussion “Outsourcing War and Peace”: Intelligence Contracting and the Ballad of Dewey Clarridge
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...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...
14 Nov Symposium on Erin Pobjie’s Prohibited Force: Use of Force as Family Resemblances – A Cautionary Take
...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...23 Sep Book Symposium: Cyber War – A Duty to Hack and the Boundaries of Analogical Reasoning
...In such cases, default presumptions may simply regard the behavoir as automatically prohibited or permitted in ways that create tensions with the law’s underlying nature and purpose. For example, I find it problematic that cyber-operations do not qualify as attacks simply because they do not involve violent consequence even if they can achieve the very same military objective as an attack. My Duty to Hack idea serves as a response to such difficulties by thinking more carefully about the rules for cyber operations and the values they serve when there...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...