Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...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...

Seth has finished his very successful tenure as a guest-blogger here at Opinio Juris and his legacy goes on. One of his posts on the potential for universal human rights deeply intrigued a colleague of mine at Hofstra, Bernard Jacobs, a professor of constitutional law and a classics scholar. His thoughtful and interesting response to Seth’s post is below: I read with interest Professor Weinberger’s piece marveling at the possibility of conflict between International Human Rights and ‘local practice, custom and tradition in the developing worlds.’ Since I live in...

...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....

I know Colombia kinda, sorta backed down in the end, but its President’s response to Trump’s mindless sabre-rattling over deportation flights deserves to be read in full by everyone. Here it is in Spanish: Trump, a mi no me gusta mucho viajar a los EEUU, es un poco aburridor, pero confieso que hay cosas meritorias, me gusta ir a los barrios negros de Washington, allí ví una lucha entera en la capital de los EEUU entre negros y latinos con barricadas, que me pareció una pendejada, porque deberían unirse. Confieso...

...spread of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV due to widespread demands for unsafe sex practices during pornography production are not discussed by Boyce. Nor are the high rates of substance abuse and suicide among performers. He does not engage with any of the scholarly work on this subject at all, nor even the cultural evidence (he could have consulted one of a number of scholarly works, including Sheila Jeffrey’s new book, The Industrial Vagina ). The late (and much missed) David Foster Wallace devoted a chapter of his book Consider...

be strictly and narrowly interpreted, the Court warned that the lawfulness of COVID-19 response measures “do[es] not depend on how laudable … they are”. This judgment makes it clear that expansion of executive powers in response to COVID-19 must be regulated to ensure that they are not misused, and that courts should where necessary intervene to ensure executive compliance with the rule of law. Government response to COVID-19 in Namibia When the first cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Namibia on 14 March 2020, the Government began to take measures...

I am very grateful to Professors Mitu Gulati and Sarah Ludington for the wealth of information they have gathered about the life of Alexander Sack, the Russian legal scholar who penned the doctrine of odious debts, in their article “A Convenient Untruth: Fact and Fantasy in the Doctrine of Odious Debts.” I have taken note of the authors’ view that an inadvertent error was made by Michael Hoeflich, whom I cited in my book, Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption and the Third World’s Environmental Legacy. I will amend the online...

...therefore may not be interrupted by the coastal State based on such passage being non-innocent; but second, that coastal States could potentially interrupt such vessels as a lawful countermeasure under the law of State responsibility. This response will engage with the first argument on the interpretation of “innocent” passage in Article 19 of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Specifically, in contrast to Cavalcanti de Mello Filho’s interpretation of Article 19(2)(a) UNCLOS, I argue that any threats or use of force in violation of...

Normally, we post our conference announcements weekly, but we just got word of one tomorrow that’s worth flagging. The British Institute of International and Comparative law (BIICL) will be holding a Rapid Response Seminar tomorrow, September 11, from 4-6 pm to discuss ‘Humanitarian Intervention, International Law and Syria’. As the title suggests, the conversation will discuss whether humanitarian intervention falls within the corpus of international law and, if so, whether it can be applied to the current Syrian situation. Robert McCorquodale (BIICL) will chair the panel, with scheduled speakers including...

Jean d’Aspremont’s supremely kind comments on my article require little response other than an expression of appreciation. Jean’s knowledge in this field is second to none, and the differences in our perceptions of these topics are minute. But it is, perhaps, worth clarifying my position on the recognition of coup regimes and the question of a democratic entitlement in international law.   There is no question that the international order has departed from the strict anti-interventionism that underlies what I have termed ‘the effective control doctrine’. Coups against ‘freely and...

[Ramesh Thakur is Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (CNND) in the Crawford School, Australian National University and Adjunct Professor in the Institute of Ethics, Governance and Law at Griffith University.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Professor Spencer Zifcak has written an insightful article on a topic that is important, timely and will not go away. His analysis and conclusions are judicious, circumspect, balanced and, in consequence, stand the test...

Many thanks to Ingrid Wuerth for her thoughtful response to my Article. I agree with Ingrid that the importance of maintaining a uniform international standard in the interpretation of incorporative statutes may be especially salient in the context of treaties, like the Hague Rules, that address coordination problems. I disagree, however, that the borrowed treaty rule is of little salience in the context of human rights treaties that seek to establish minimum international standards. An international standard contained in a human rights treaty is typically invoked by domestic litigants only...