Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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...

[Philip Alston responds to Frédéric Mégret’s comments on Alston’s recently published article, Hobbling the Monitors: Should U.N. Human Rights Monitors be Accountable?. This post is part of the Second Harvard International Law Journal/Opinio Juris Symposium.] I am grateful to Frédéric Mégret for his very thoughtful comments on my article. Fred’s own excellent work on the accountability of “International Prosecutors: Accountability and Ethics” (available at ) is one of the few sustained and probing analyses of the difficult topic of the accountability of those playing a crucial role in what might...

[Frédéric Mégret, Assistant Professor of Law at McGill University Faculty of Law and Canada Research Chair in the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, responds to Philip Alston, Hobbling the Monitors: Should U.N. Human Rights Monitors be Accountable?. This post is part of the Second Harvard International Law Journal/Opinio Juris Symposium.] Philip Alston’s article on special rapporteurs suggests that there may be some merit on hobbling them a little, just not necessarily in the way that a majority of states at the Human Rights Council seem to want. The...

...State Department?” That is, isn’t it plausible that increased engagement is simply “the result of Congress having ratified a number of treaties with reporting obligations, and authority for fulfilling those obligations having been turned over to the Legal Advisor’s Office”? There are two distinct responses to this important question. First, it is useful to underscore that my article does not in fact make any claim about the cultures and roles of the U.S. Congress and the Office of the Legal Advisor. To the contrary, the crux of my argument is...

[Jonathan Turner is a barrister in London and Chief Executive of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) ] Practising advocates know that what is not included in reply submissions is usually more interesting than what is there. One of the omissions in the ICC Prosecutor’s recent Response on the issue of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in respect of Palestine is that it does not address the argument made by the amicus, UKLFI, based on the rights of the Jewish people derived from the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. Indeed, while...

...seen before: namely, the insinuation that the African Union (AU) believes international courts do not have to recognise personal immunity. I assume that claim is a response to my contrary one in the article mentioned above — opposition that I have cited as a reason to be skeptical of the idea (endorsed by a number of scholars) that the General Assembly will support a Special Tribunal in large numbers. Here is what Coracini and Trahan say about the AU, referencing the Jordan case: It is worthy of note that during...

...courts read that as meaning consequential damages are included and others read the fact that consequential damages is excluded from the litany of possible damages as meaning that consequential damages are not available to a seller. Both judges would look at the same text and say this is what they mean. Whether that is using the law as a means to an end can be discussed. I think that where the judge is seeking justice is not such a bad thing. I sensed that Stevens was seeking justice. Best, Ben...

...in response to its policy of apartheid, is more controversial: the leading handbook of Schermers and Blokker points out that such a de facto suspension or expulsion would amount to “an illegal circumvention of special procedures such as those laid down in Articles 5 and 6 of the Charter” – action by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council – and would arguably be ultra vires (para. 263). The decision to exclude South Africa from the work of the General Assembly clearly rested upon political support, but...

[Carsten Stahn is Professor of International Criminal Law and Global Justice at Leiden University and Programme Director of the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law, Executive Editor of the Criminal Law Forum and project leader of the Jus Post Bellum Project.] Harold Koh’s thought-provoking post on Just Security on ‘Syria and the Law of Humanitarian Intervention – Part II’ illustrates the struggles of international law to cope with injustices and violations of legal norms, including the ban of the prohibition...

terms of Article 36 of 1977 Additional Protocol I. OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE RESPONSE TO: Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016. This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For By Paul Shawcross The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons: The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than 850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it. The Administration...

armed conflict without taking into account the comparative justness of their causes. Consider the distributive-justice rationale for CDRs. Blum says that “[i]n transposing distributive justice arguments onto war, the question arises whether the general moral obligations that are owed by one society to another endure when the two societies are at war.” How can that question be answered without considering whether one party to the conflict is an aggressor and one is simply defending itself? As far as I can tell, there is no coherent normative rationale for assuming that...

[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...