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Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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 | |

11 Mar

...as held by any sovereign in any other society.” After the other two cabinet members expressed views more in line with Hamilton than Jefferson, Washington urged them all to reach a consensus. “He seemed to direct those efforts more towards me,” Jefferson recorded dryly, “but the thing could not be done.” Fast-forward to today – and we are still far from consensus on the exact contours of the treaty power in our constitutional system. In a chapter on treaties in his excellent new book, International Law in the U.S. Legal...
11.03.13 | |

12 Mar

[Kristina Daugirdas is Assistant Professor of Law at Michigan Law] I’m delighted to have the opportunity to comment on Professor Curt Bradley’s excellent new book. Before getting to the question of how the decisions and orders of international institutions are integrated into U.S. law—Professor Bradley’s main focus in this chapter—it’s worth pausing to consider why states bother to create international institutions at all. States could have drafted a series of treaties that simply codified substantive obligations relating to various issue areas. Instead, they created institutions and delegated authority to them...
12.03.13 | |

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 | |

11 Sep

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...
11.09.11 | |

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 | |

14 Feb

...however, these doctrines were expressions or applications of the broader concept of self-preservation, which Verdebout admits, was recognized as a fundamental right of states. To Verdebout, this confirms the core claim of the book, which is that pre-1914 international law was not indifferent towards the question of the use of force. For instance, on pages 204-205, Verdebout notes that in all the cases of intervention surveyed in her book, the use of force was “presented as sanctions of law – i.e., as the exercise of the right of self-preservation.” This,...
14.02.23 | |

02 Dec

...ECtHR caselaw in the area of extraterritoriality that Marko exposes in his book serves as a reminder of the delicate balance that any rights adjudicator must strike between adherence and respect for its rulings and the institutional bounds set out for it by the treaty states. While the delegations problems are not unique to international human rights institutions, they raise different concerns and dangers than do other international judicial delegations. The experience of the U.S. Supreme Court on the extraterritoriality of American constitutional rights (see Kal Raustiala’s fine book, discussed...
02.12.11 | |

17 May

[Steve Vladeck is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Scholarship at American University Washington College of Law.] 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. One needn’t look far for proof that the issues raised by Laura Dickinson’s Outsourcing War and Peace with regard to the absence of liability for military contractors are at the forefront of contemporary law and policy. If...
17.05.12 | |

08 Jun

...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.)...
08.06.12 | |

03 Oct

...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?...
03.10.13 | |

18 Jun

[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...
18.06.12 | |