Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
12 Mar Cheng Book Roundtable: When Should International Law Do More than Work?
...when we shouldn’t. In those cases, we should find a way to do the right thing without undermining the overall international legal system, which has an inherent moral value in maintaining minimum world order. If this account of Professor Cheng’s policy-oriented theory is accurate, then one might think he is simply updating the New Haven School for the 21st Century. But this (far from small) accomplishment is only one part of his book. What makes WILW so unusual is that it attempts to apply its framework to an astonishingly wide...16 Feb The Modern Doctrine(s) of Non-Self-Executing Treaties
[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...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...12 Mar Cheng Book Roundtable: How to Assess the Value of International Legal Theory
I agree with Professor Cheng that legal theory does not have to be predictive to be successful. But I wonder if he sets the bar a bit too low. In his previous post, he writes: Providing a framework of analysis to address international problems, to guide but not control, is perhaps the best that can be done. It may also be the most that ought to be done. But two of the leading alternative theories that Professor Cheng discusses in his book claim to do more than simply guide. One,...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...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...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...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...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?...