Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of motive.” Here is Scott Horton, who discusses the case in detail at Harpers today: The facts developed in the Rahmatullah case have clarified the circumstances surrounding one of the notorious Justice Department memoranda issued during the Iraq War. In March 2004, Jack Goldsmith, then head of Justice’s opinion-writing arm, the Office of Legal Counsel, was asked...

...by the editors, and so forth. The journal may even have a policy never to publish such response pieces, while of course allowing for criticism of previously published work in separate, self-contained articles. Bad idea? Probably. Out of bounds? No, as there are plenty of other avenues of expressing legitimate disagreement. Similarly, with Lawfare, you can always write a post in response on OJ, I can write one on EJIL Talk, somebody else can create their own blog, use Facebook or whatever. I just don't see why you think that...

[Tai-Heng Cheng is the international disputes partner of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP in New York. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of his firm or its clients.] Congratulations are due to the authors of Informal International Lawmaking, and especially to the editors, Professors Pauwelyn, Wesssel and Wouters, for their keen observations and appraisals of the global decisionmaking processes as they operate today. Opinio Juris has assigned me the task of commentating on the legal and normative nature of international decisionmaking processes that the authors...

[Jan Wouters is Professor of International Law and International Organizations, Jean Monnet Chair Ad Personam EU and Global Governance, and Director of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and Institute for International Law at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven).] Once we conclude that IN-LAW is not devoid of impact and cannot be ignored as a normative process, the question of the accountability of the involved actors, processes, and output may be raised. This question is addressed in Part IV. Eyal Benvenisti (Chapter 13) ‒ one of...

a ‘courtroom’ should look like and intentionally refuse to transition towards liberal market capitalism. (See Marcos Zunino, Justice Framed). In sum, then, for me one broader takeaway of Jalloh’s book is methodological in nature. Where should ‘we’ look? With whom should ‘we’ engage? Who is the ‘we’? Does the world really need yet another ‘qualitative methods’ doctoral dissertation that interviews Hague lawyers at the ICC, ICTY, and ICTR? That defoliates some other arcane detail of the ICC’s Rome Statute? Perhaps the time has come to foster a more complete and...

...it had become imperative to prevent aggressive war (use of force) through the rule of law.While not all that is contained in the chapter is new (some of the same territory is covered, for example, in Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s book, The Internationalists ), the background is central to understanding the use of force regime in the Charter and the book would be incomplete without it.   The chapter additionally examines some open questions—what one might call “grey areas”—in the Charter regime and customary international law, particularly related to the...

...Law’s Main Challenges” in D Armstrong (ed), Routledge Handbook of International Law (Routledge 2009) at 404. Schachter’s “invisible college” of international lawyers seems to have largely disappeared and has been replaced by a patchwork quilt of specialized international lawyers. Diverse interpretive communities have come to play an increasingly important role in treaty interpretation. This development raises concerns about the unity of international law, not just in relation to its interpretive methods, but also in relation the system as a whole. The challenge going forward is how to achieve a reasonable...

[Julian Arato is an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School.] Interpretation in International Law is something of an iconoclastic volume, from its critical ethos to its provocative structure around the metaphor of the game. The object of its revisionism, above all, is an apparently stagnant formalism that seems too prevalent in the theory and practice of interpretation in international law today. Symbolic of this antiquated formalism – for the editors and for many of the contributors – are the rules of interpretation embedded in the Vienna Convention on the...

I will join the chorus of praise for this terrific book. But I want to add briefly to Peter’s critique of Ben’s premise that the current threat from transnational terrorism has us in a “long war,” by looking at what this means for broader foreign policy – one that encompasses, but it is not driven by, domestic legal policy. The book correctly, and refreshingly, recognizes two important points: (1) that addressing the threat of terrorism requires approaches that encompass domestic law enforcement and regulation as well as applications of armed...

My general view is that critical book reviews are much more interesting than positive ones (unless it is of my own book, that is). And so I read with great interest George Mason Law Professor Jeremy Rabkin’s takedown of Kathryn Sikkink’s new book “The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics.” The Sikkink book argues, through an empirical study, that human rights prosecutions are having an important effect on changing international politics. Rabkin’s criticism of the Sikkink “Justice Cascade” thesis, especially her choice of data and her...

...that my area was ‘heavily published in’ (OUP) or that my work was ‘not within [the publisher’s] commissioning interests’ (CUP).  I have witnessed other female colleagues face similar challenges with OUP and/or CUP. Meanwhile, white male colleagues continue to publish their work in the same or similar areas with both publishers. Examples include Patrick Labuda’s book ‘In the Court’s Shadow: International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability’, Barrie Sanders’ new book ‘Doing Justice to History: Confronting the Past in International Criminal Courts’, and my personal friend Antonio Coco’s forthcoming book ‘The...

...don’t seem to have felt much obligation other than simply to repeat opinions from past years, rather than actually engage with the memoir on its own terms (call me cynical, but as a long-time book reviewer, let’s say I’m not persuaded that all the reviewers have read more than a few of the most controversial chapters of the book — lightly). Hanson, by contrast, is defending Cheney, and reads the memoir more sympathetically but also far more closely. In the end, agree or disagree either with Hanson or with Cheney,...