Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

[Michael D. Goldhaber serves as Senior International Correspondent and “The Global Lawyer” columnist for The American Lawyer and the ALM media group. His writes widely on human rights and corporate accountability, international arbitration, and global multiforum disputes. His e-book on Chevron will be published next year by Amazon. His first post can be found here.] I’m grateful for the very gracious and insightful comments shared by the eminent arbitrator Christoph Schreuer, the scourge of eminent arbitrators Muthucumaraswamy Sornarjah, and the wunderkind of arbitration scholarship, Anthea Roberts. Having solicited a wide...

In How International Law Works I grapple with the question of how states make the trade-off among the various features of agreements, including hard and soft law. I am not sure I agree that Kal’s empirical puzzle actually exists, but let’s assume it does and see why that might be so. A very similar question is discussed in the book – why are dispute resolution procedures almost never used in soft law agreements? The argument in the book (pp. 157-161) is very close to what follows. One possible explanation for...

...background, the aim of this blog is to highlight the necessity of ensuring the consistency of public health policies taken as part of the global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic with human rights law and standards. As outlined in a prescient 2019 Lancet Commission report – The legal determinants of health: harnessing the power of law for global health and sustainable development – the law, and a firm commitment to the rule of law, play a critical role in the pursuit of global health with justice. Ultimately, scientifically sound, evidence-based,...

Many thanks to Professor Cheffins for his thoughtful response, in which he highlights an important challenge in evaluating the degree of shareholder-centrism in differing corporate governance systems—the difficulty of quantifying the impact of varying legal strategies for protecting shareholders’ interests. In this reply to the issues raised by Professor Cheffins, I distinguish various metrics of shareholder-centrism and consider the degree to which they are amenable to straightforward cross-border comparison. Professor Cheffins agrees that U.K. shareholders possess greater governance rights than U.S. shareholders do, but rightly observes that rules of civil...

...the title, given the conclusions of the article). Jens has been hard at work, and has just posted to SSRN a response to Ryan, a short, fifteen page paper responding directly to Ryan’s paper as well as taking up some of the issues raised by CBJJ. Here is the abstract (graf break added) to Jens’s paper, The Capture-Kill Debate, at SSRN. Highly recommended (as we Proud Followers of Larry Solum say): In a recent essay, Ryan Goodman offers a vigorous defense of the duty to capture under the law of...

...ad bellum appraisal of NATO’s conduct as humanitarian intervention influenced our in bello appraisal of how it conducted the military campaign. 2. In terms of the evidence: I suggest that the DA has been misconstrued or misapplied, sometimes deliberately, but more often subconsciously or tacitly—in part because of natural self-serving biases. I doubt that any belligerent would openly claim that the justice of its cause relieves it of or relaxes the in bello constraints under which it must conduct warfare (although, notably, the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, and others, in...

[Dr. Oliver Gerstenberg is Reader in Law at the University of Leeds. Dr. Gerstenberg is one of the leading scholars in this field.] Would the European Court of Justice (ECJ), as Vlad Perju suggests, benefit from a “discursive turn” (338); brought about by “allow[ing] its members to enter separate opinions” (309); in an effort to “politicize” EU law (327)—with the long-term objective of “enhanc[ing] the citizenry’s sense of a shared political identity” (329)? Consider some background: The ECJ is primarily an economic court. Yet its role has changed dramatically. Drawing...

if viewed as a general normative framework for evaluating state responses to mass atrocity. I nevertheless reluctantly endorse Moreno-Ocampo’s insistence on traditional prosecutions for the accused because I am skeptical of the ICC’s ability to safeguard its legitimacy while making the kinds of judgments that Mark’s approach demands. In other words, my position hinges on distinguishing the specific institutional setting of the ICC from a general normative framework for transitional justice. To elaborate on the source of my unease, I proceed from the realization that legal responses to mass atrocity...

Thank you to Professor Corn for his exceptionally thoughtful response to the article. His observations illustrate vividly, and persuasively, the apparent choices undergirding the traditional approach my Article critiques. I’ll reply briefly to some of his comments and conclude by highlighting what I perceive to be larger issues in the law of war that our dialogue might provoke. Professor Corn casts application of the traditional four combatant criteria to CNA participants as a presumption, bringing with it the attendant benefits of clarity and predictability. His Miranda analogy suggests that law...

Eugene has graciously responded to my earlier post; you can find his new post here. It’s well worth a read. I just want to offer a few thoughts on Eugene’s response, because I think it fails to address the core of my critique: that it is incorrect to claim, as Eugene did in his first post, that Europe’s opposition to the juvenile death penalty is based on the idea that “minors are not really responsible for their actions.” I argued that, on the contrary, Europe’s opposition to the juvenile death...

In the first part of my response to Bobby, I argued (after meandering around a bit) that Title 50’s “fifth function” provision cannot be used to authorise the CIA to kill Americans overseas — a necessary condition of any argument that the CIA is entitled to a public-authority justification with regard to 18 USC 1119, the foreign-murder statute. (Bobby kindly responds here.) I thus ended that post by asking where else that authority might be found. Which brings me to the second argument Bobby makes: namely, that the President’s authority...

...capital markets. It is also important to note that they provide an analytical framework for analyzing different modes of business law reform in general, from the perspective of demand- and supply-side factors, which could be applied to a wide range of legal reforms. The article starts by raising a good question of why the regulatory responses to hostile takeovers are very different among the three countries who share the similar capital markets (the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan). After applying their analytical framework to the three countries, the...