Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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...

I am grateful for the opportunity to read and comment on Peter Danchin’s “Suspect Symbols: Value Pluralism as a Theory of Religious Freedom in International Law.” The tolerance that it advocates reflects a generally healthy human rights impulse. Hence, I wish that I could write a positive response to the article into which a great deal of thought and work has obviously gone. Unfortunately, while it is well-written and literate, I disagree with a number of its ideas – and find some of them especially alarming from a women’s human...

...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...

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...

intelligence. (p.4) Hill’s book is a treatment of the lessons in statecraft that one can glean from great literature. (However, note this criticism of Hill and his book.) If it “has not been much recognized” that those books can have lessons in statecraft, I’d like to propose that it has been even less recognized that there are some great insights to be learned from fantastic fiction. Science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, books described in this way are rarely described as “great literature.” And when they are, it is sometimes as...

...the 1903 Royal Commission on Alien Immigration and the Alien’s Act 1905. The book contains the most detailed legal analysis of the 1915-6 Hussein-McMahon correspondence, as well as the Balfour Declaration, and takes a closer look at the travaux préparatoires that formed the British Mandate of Palestine. It places the violent reaction of the Palestine Arabs to mass Jewish immigration in the context of Zionism, highlighting the findings of several British commissions of inquiry which recommended that Britain abandon its policy. The book also revisits the controversies over the question...

...peer review articles is that while your journal articles are peer reviewed (and this subject to the political self-interest) you also have "books" published through Oxford. Well it seems like the books are the subject to the same "peer reviewed" approval process. https://global.oup.com/academic/authors/submissions/?cc=il&lang=en& I also understand that in the peer review process you can "suggest" peer reviewers - ??? Is this true? So one can "suggest" people one knows will be partial to approving because the author cites to them in the paper or suggests personal friends or known political...

...to property. CarrieLyn Guymon Response... The ECJ's decision in Kadi is interesting, but it did leave in place the asset freeze, providing an opportunity for the sanctions to be maintained so long as some additional post-hoc process is afforded. My article recommends that the US also provide more information regarding the basis for designations under E.O. 13,382. The ECJ agrees that this need not be done in advance nor should it jeopardize the need to protect classified information. I think that the process in the EU can be tweaked slightly...

Jordan Response... In my opinion, the issue of liability under international law is a question of international law, not U.S. domestic law. Logically, one cannot violate international law if one does not have a duty (liability) under international law. I would prefer that the U.S. Supreme Court continue to recognize what it has already recognized in at least 20 Supreme Court cases! -- that corporations and companies can have duties and rights under international law, customary and treaty-based -- as documented in the only law review article to date that...

responses’, which peppered Alexander’s original written responses and that are now (thanks to Edward Snowden I assume) largely absent from Rogers’ answers; and (c) the softening of the language regarding the U.S. willingness to respond in self-defense where attribution is a problem. What do readers think? Is this all one, harmonious, consistent U.S. policy? Or, are there shifts in these responses that bear watching? Anyone interested in comparing the remainder of the two testimonies can do so by seeing what Alexander wrote here versus Rogers’ more recent written responses here....

Peter Spiro Mike, Thanks for the response. All points well taken. I don't for a minute mean to imply that this isn't a worthwhile project. The fact that others clearly see value in historical textualism alone makes your book an important one, and it's interesting history to boot. Nor would I argue that text and its historical meaning is completely irrelevant in confronting contemporary controversies. But I would discount it pretty steeply. Only where founding materials work to establish a norm's pedigree do I think it serves much purpose. Any...

...Bagram) actually imprisoned? And, who, lawfully, in the United States, gets to decide - not years later in response to better-than-nothing habeas petitions, but initially - and how, that persons captured out of uniform, without a weapon, and away from any actual hostile enemy action, are "combatants" for a NON-State party in a NON-international armed conflict whose detention the international law of war evidently leaves (both in theory and in practice) almost entirely to the discretion and supervision of the domestic law of the individual State party holding the prisoners?...