Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
30 Aug Symposium on Occupation Law: The Necessary Non-Normativity and Temporal Indeterminacy of Occupation Law
[Eugene Kontorovich is a Professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. This post is part of an ongoing symposium on Professor Aeyal Gross’s book The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation (CUP, 2017).] Prof. Gross’s excellent book The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation presents a normative synthesis of international humanitarian and international human rights law design to provide an occupation law regime acutely focused on protected persons and the ensuring that the temporariness of the occupation. Gross’s honest embrace of...10 Apr Book Symposium: Interpretation — An Exact Art
[Philip Allott is Emeritus Professor of International Public Law at the University of Cambridge.] Interpretation of any text – religious, political, historical, scientific, literary, artistic, legal – raises profound philosophical problems. Interpretation of a legal text is in a class of its own, because it can have direct and substantial social effects, determining people’s lives. The philosophy of legal interpretation is the philosophy of a fundamental aspect of social existence. The philosophical problems of interpretation stem from the fact that interpretation is a re-presentation of a presentation of...06 Jul International Issues and Domestic Criminal Defense: A Guide For Practitioners
One of the ways to heighten student and faculty interest in international, comparative and cross-cultural legal issues is to examine those issues through the lens of traditional domestic topics. Nothing seems more “local” than criminal defense. The newly published Second Edition of “Cultural Issues in Criminal Defense,” edited by Linda Friedman Ramirez, an attorney in Florida, should put that assumption of locality to rest. The book is an off-the-shelf guide for practitioners, which the publisher describes as follows: Cultural Issues in Criminal Defense is an indispensable book for the criminal...06 Mar Exploring the Limits of International Human Rights Law
approach of Limits. First, the book largely ignores the effect of international human rights legal institutions (e.g., ad hoc and permanent courts) on a range of state and individual behavior. Second, by focusing almost exclusively on interstate behavior and international political institutions, Goldsmith and Posner fail to examine the domestic dimension of human rights compliance. Third, by minimizing the role of individuals, NGOs, corporations, and other non-state actors, the book paints a distorted picture of the current processes through which human rights norms are elaborated and enforced. Fourth, the book...
01 Apr Justice in Extreme Cases Symposium: The Harms of the Derelict Commander
paying more attention to the commander’s obligations to their subordinates. These points are offered as a way of applauding the generative nature of Justice in Extreme Cases. I have touched on only a small part of the book, but even that small part, like the rest of the work, offers a set of rigorous arguments and elucidating examples that ultimately demonstrate the fruitful relationship between international criminal law and criminal theory and open up avenues for continued exploration and opportunities for reform. Both fields are enriched by this important book....13 May Is Democracy Possible Beyond the State?
...beyond the state. Marc Plattner has a fine new book out, Democracy Without Borders: Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy. As Plattner states on the page 3, “Very crudely stated, the contention of this book is that we cannot hope to enjoy liberalism (at least in today’s world) unless it is accompanied by democracy, and we cannot enjoy liberal democracy outside the framework of the nation-state.” Later in the book on Page 107, Plattner quotes political scientists Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan as follows: “Without a state, they argue, “no modern...15 Oct The AfPak Conflict and the Leadup to the December 2010 Review
...or beyond, etc. – at this moment there are two key sources. One is Woodward’s new book. I took a pause out of writing some stuff on these topics to read the book; events unfolding now appear quite directly to follow on the path laid out in the President’s review of Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy a year ago. This is the main narrative of the book, and well worth reading closely. There’s little going on now that is not presaged in those discussions. And current events are both following a...25 Feb Will Anyone Publish Saif Gaddafi’s Book on Civil Society?
...to publish the two extraordinary books Saif wrote on civil society and democratic reform in the developing world, will presumably now cancel publication. Barber is probably correct in predicting that Oxford will back down from publication. But is that necessarily the right decision? The junior Gaddafi’s study sounds pretty useful to anyone interested in nonstate actors. It’s not every academic study that has The Monitor Group on board crunching the data! Although Oxford could no longer count on a large bulk sale, it would surely sell better than average for...
17 May Symposium on Systemic Racism and Sexism in Legal Academia: Transparency, Diversity and Representation in Mainstream Academic Publishing – International Law Monograph Series
...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...