Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

Kevin and I have still never met in person, but we’ve already had our first twitter encounter last week on the legality of a U.S. military response to the attacks that killed the U.S. Ambassador in Libya (as well as three other Americans). Although the news reports on the attacks are not exactly clear, some have suggested that there is no Al Qaeda link to the groups behind the Benghazi attacks. This does suggest a new wrinkle to the legal analysis of any U.S. military response. First, under domestic American...

The West has shown an impressive display of shock and disgust in response to Ahmadinejad’s remarks yesterday that the Holocaust is a myth. But as reported here, the silence from the Arab world has been deafening. “While official Arab reaction in such cases is usually slower than international reaction, any issue involving a defense of Israel is a thorny one for Arab governments, who risk appearing to side with Israel against a Muslim nation.” Why is an admission that the Holocaust actually occurred and that millions of Jews actually were...

I thank Kevin for his extensive and thoughtful response to my post. You touched on many issues which I hope to address systematically in subsequent posts, such as the illegality of the settlers presence. I’m going to try to avoid getting into those issues right now, since this post (like yours before it) is already quite long. I apologize in advance for typos. Two points of clarification. What prompted my post is a comment by Sen. Mitchell that the administration wants to see a freeze in settlement growth as measured...

and curtailing public health emergencies, culminating in the failures in the COVID-19 response. Findings from all three of these reports converge on the role of early and decisive action at the outset of an outbreak to strengthen robust responses to pandemic threats. On this point, criticism is rightly addressed at both the substance and implementation of the International Health Regulations (IHR). Despite their relatively recent revisions in 2005, under a similar but less amplified moment of crisis in the aftermath of SARS, the IHR have come under scrutiny inter alia...

...Contemporary Jerusalem. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. *Rose, John. The Myths of Zionism. London: Pluto Press, 2004. *Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal. Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion. London: Pluto Press, 2002. *Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. *Said, Edward W. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Vintage Books, 2001 ed. *Said, Edward W. and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London: Verso, 1988. *Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement,...

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...

...the actions taken in self-defense to a series of wrongful acts should not be judged through the limited scope of an immediate response to an isolated attack; rather, the actions should be viewed as a response to the total consequences. For Israel’s claim, the Security Council refused to aggregate the PLO’s series of attacks and deemed Israel’s actions to be in violation of international law. Conducting a strict reading of the language of Article 51, the Security Council could only scrutinize Israeli action taken in response to particularized attacks by...

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...

...letter was a sufficient response to very serious allegations made against the Australian government by one of its own MPs. As I’ve tried to show in this post, the OTP’s analysis of those allegations is factually deficient and legally questionable. But perhaps that’s why the response is so cursory. A more searching analysis, one that took seriously the damning facts in our communication to the OTP, would almost certainly have concluded that the Australian government is responsible for a wide variety of crimes against humanity on Nauru and Manus Island....

...the two requirements of CIL. On the other hand, a vague definition runs the risk of being empty rhetoric that does not require the World Bank to do much of anything, let alone out of a sense of legal obligation. Sarfaty concludes her response by asking whether one should distinguish between legal internalization and social or political internalization. My answer, both here and in the article, is an emphatic “yes,” and the current requirements of CIL provide the place for us to look to discern whether a moral norm has...

[Avraham Russell Shalev is a lawyer and researcher at Kohelet Policy Forum in Israel] Editors’ Note: This article is a response to a post by Alonso Gurmendi, available here. To read Alonso’s rejoinder, please see here. In a recent article, Alonso Gurmendi responded to a legal opinion released by the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists in the context of the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the “legal consequences on practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”. The authors of the Opinion critique the assumption inherent in the request for the...

to organized political communities, including the international community as symbolized by the United Nations, law is a necessary but not sufficient condition for legitimacy. Perhaps the UN University could undertake a project devoted to the theoretical exploration of the relationship by a team of political scientists and international law scholars. Second, rather than the relationship between legitimacy and justice, that between power and justice or, even better, between realism and idealism, will prove more fruitful in the UN context. The organization needs to achieve a better balance between the wish...