Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
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...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...
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...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...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...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...