Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
02 Dec Slowing Down “The Justice Cascade”
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...17 Oct Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: Legality and Normativity
[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...18 Oct Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: Accountability and Domestic Implementation of IN-LAW
[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...07 Apr Book Symposium: The Rise of Interpretive Communities in Treaty Interpretation
...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 Schachter’s “invisible college” of international lawyers seems to have largely disappeared and has been replaced by a patchwork quilt of specialized international lawyers.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...08 Apr Book Symposium: Accounting for Difference in Treaty Interpretation over Time
[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...
20 Apr Symposium on International Conflict and Security Law: A Research Handbook – Use of Force, Veto Use at the UN Security Council, and the Crime of Aggression
...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...30 Jul Gabor Rona on Targeted Killing: A Response to Michael Lewis
...the U.S. taking liberties with the principle of distinction will cause the next Srebrenica or that better U.S. targeting behavior will prevent it. But if the US is, indeed, the indispensable nation for promotion of international human rights, then just consider how Abu Ghraib and enhanced interrogation techniques affected the ability of the U.S. to complain about torture elsewhere and how that disability affects the will and ability of the international community to bring torturers to justice. Finally, Mike makes an interesting point in speculating that what people really object...
28 Oct Winter is [Not] Coming: Game of Thrones as an Allegory for Climate Change & International Politics
...Game of Thrones functions as a powerful tool to demonstrate multiple facets of lacking climate action—from the repeated defeat and disillusionment experienced by those seeking to rally a collective response, to the surge of hope following an agreement to act, to the decision of certain nefarious actors to deliberately feign their cooperation and seek to manipulate the responses others for their own material benefit. There is further power in this mode of portraying themes surrounding collective action in a Sci-Fi television series that is so thoroughly apolitical, because it creates...14 Oct Guest Post: Air Strikes in Syria–Questions Surrounding the Necessity and Proportionality Requirements in the Exercise of Self-Defense
...to reinforce the argument of Tams and Devaney concerning the relationship between geography and self-defense actions against irregular forces. By way of contrast, several examples can be found during the UN era where a state condemned the remoteness of the response taken in self-defense against both state and non-state actors. For example, when the US claimed that its 1986 aerial bombing of Libyan territory had been validly undertaken in response to imminent attacks from Libyan-sponsored terrorists (UN SCOR, 2674th mtg, UN Doc S/PV.2674 (15 April 1986); Stanimir A. Alexandrov, Self-Defense...25 Jan A Response to David Sloss by Carlos Vázquez
of non-self-executing treaties was relevant only to Chief Justice Marshall and one other Justice, and that was because these two Justices construed Article 8 to require the United States to recognize these grants as if the land had in fact belonged to Spain between 1803 and 1819. These two Justices were inclined to accept such a construction because a declaration was appended to the treaty specifying that, notwithstanding Article 8, three specified grants did not need to be recognized. One of these three specifically excluded grants lay in territory that,...