Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

Although Julian and I continue to disagree about the merits of the arrest warrant against Bashir, we agree on one thing: Obama’s response to the expulsion of the humanitarian-aid groups has been appallingly weak. I’m not surprised — I never bought into the cult of Obama, particularly its naive belief that his foreign policy and national-security policy would be fundamentally different than Bush’s — but I am still disappointed. I had intended to write a longer post criticizing Obama’s inaction on Darfur, but I don’t think I can put it...

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...

...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,...

Thank to Jeff for this thought provoking comment and his kind words about my book. I am not sure that my response addresses all his concerns, but I hope it at least speaks to some of them! Let me first state that while I agree with much of what Jeff has stated in his post, I do not agree when he says that my conception of compliance presupposes a particular understanding of international law. My book’s central focus is an attempt to explain how a rule of international law can...

[Mark A. Drumbl is a Professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law] In Complementarity in Crisis: Uganda, Alternative Justice, and the International Criminal Court, Professor Alexander Greenawalt strikes a cautionary note. He underscores that the ICC cannot on its own effectively serve transitional justice interests. It needs help. In the end, Sasha concludes that “the Ugandan peace process reveals the [ICC] to be a promising but unstable institution, one whose legitimacy may ironically depend on help from external stakeholders, including the very political actor – the UN Security...

[Scott Kennedy, associate professor of Political Science and East Asian Languages & Cultures and director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics & Business at Indiana University, responds to Mark Wu, Antidumping in Asia’s Emerging Giants. This post is part of the Third Harvard International Law Journal/Opinio Juris Symposium.] Antidumping: Less Change than Meets the Eye Mark Wu’s article, “Antidumping in Asia’s Emerging Giants,” is an impressive piece of scholarship and deserves widespread attention. He analyzes how an already controversial element of the trading system, the antidumping regime, has become...

[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...

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...

...to the ongoing investigations in Kenya, Tanzania and the United States to apprehend the perpetrators of these cowardly criminal acts and to bring them swiftly to justice.” But I doubt that “justice” necessarily equates to gunship attacks. And, given that the U.S. explanation seems keyed to the 1998 attacks, I wonder whether that precludes the United States from relying on any later U.N. Security Council resolutions that might have broader language with respect to authorizing the use of force to combat terrorism. And what of self-defense? Certainly, the United States...

[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...