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Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

07 Jul

Thanks to Roger Alford, Matt Waxman, Ken Anderson, Chris Borgen, and Peggy McGuiness for their interesting posts today. I wanted to respond to Roger’s very astute observation about 1993. We do write about the disaster on the national security side, but as he notes, Clinton also got NAFTA passed that year, which was a major achievement. It was really striking to us as we did the research for the book the difference between Clinton on economics and Clinton on national security in that first year. He was so confident of...
07.07.08 | |

21 Feb

...In September 2018, Pence even brought it up when he visited el-Sisi. In response, el-Sisi promised to give the matter “serious attention.” Egyptian authorities assured Kassem and the US that Kassem would be freed if he renounced his Egyptian citizenship. In response, Kassem filed papers to terminate his Egyptian citizenship. Yet Egyptian authorities seemingly ignored Kassem’s documents and nothing changed for Kassem. After six months, Kassem became disillusioned with any hope for freedom and began a hunger strike, which inflamed his diabetic condition and caused him to die. Is Egypt...
21.02.20 | |

25 Nov

[Anne Herzberg is the Legal Advisor of NGO Monitor and the UN Representative for the Institute for NGO Research.] On November 2, 2021, Tara Van Ho, Senior Lecturer at Essex University, posted “The Unexpected Trade and Business Implications of Israel’s Attack on Al Haq” at Opinio Juris. In the piece, Van Ho condemns Israel’s designation of six Palestinian NGOs for their alleged affiliations with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), in particular the designation of Palestinian NGO Al Haq, which she characterizes as the...
25.11.21 | |

06 Feb

Mike Lind asks in effect, what makes England and America special compared to other commercial powers, especially the Italian city states – and why shouldn’t the Anglo-American political tradition be seen as more closely integrated into the history of republican, humanist letters passing through the Italian states back into antiquity? In effect he is asking whether there isn’t too little Europe in my story – have I insisted too hard on trying to see the Anglo-American story (or Batavo-Anglo-American story given the Dutch dimension) in isolation from...
06.02.08 | |

07 Jul

I am very pleased to be able to comment on Ingrid Wuerth’s recent article, Foreign Official Immunity Determinations in U.S. Courts: The Case Against the State Department. As readers of this blog are aware, the Supreme Court held in Samantar v. Yousuf that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) generally does not apply to suits against individual foreign officials, and that the immunity of such officials is to be determined instead as a matter of common law. The Executive Branch is now claiming (as it claimed before Samantar)...
07.07.11 | |

11 Feb

...strictly speaking, be a loss of a state’s reputation for compliance with international law, but it might nevertheless be a costly loss of reputation for cooperation. This certainly seems to be what has happened to the United States with respect to both the ICC and the Kyoto Protocol. So as you suggest, Roger, there is a close connection between accepting an international legal obligation and complying with it. My book does discuss how joining a treaty can help a country to gain reputation, and how the presence of a treaty...
11.02.08 | |

28 Sep

[Opinio Juris Note: Thanks to everyone, especially David Moore, for participating in the online workshop this week. Here is David’s last post and the last contribution to what has been a very interesting and useful workshop.] Marty is, of course, right that the issue before the Court in Sosa was not whether all CIL qualifies as federal common law or whether the creation of CIL-based common law requires positive authorization. The issue was whether the ATS supports common law claims based on CIL. That does not mean, however,...
28.09.06 | |

04 Dec

...“the potential cases being considered for investigation by the Office” — not on the general availability or effectiveness of the domestic criminal-justice system in question. It is thus irrelevant that “[t]he United States has one of the most developed and effective military justice systems in the world, which has the demonstrated ability and willingness to hold its own accountable for violations of the law, including any violations in the context of detention operations.” The only question is whether the US is investigating the same cases as the OTP. Second, and...
04.12.14 | |

26 Sep

Thanks to Beth and Julian for their insightful comments. Let me respond to a few of them. Beth suggests that the “modern position” and “revisionist” categories are exaggerated and simplistic, apparently because she perceives that no CIL qualifies as federal common law under the revisionist view while all CIL qualifies as common law under the modern position view. Some adherents to the modern position, she asserts, stake out the “middle ground,” not captured by these categories, in which CIL is a source of federal common law in appropriate...
26.09.06 | |

21 Jun

[John E. Noyes is the Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at California Western School of Law.] I do not share Professor Rabkin’s pessimistic view of the prospect of international arbitration of law of the sea disputes under the Law of the Sea Convention. LOS Convention tribunals and the law of the sea experts who serve as judges and arbitrators have helped to resolve disputes peacefully and to reinforce Convention rules. For example, in the merits stage of the M/V “Saiga” (No. 2) case, the International Tribunal...
21.06.12 | |

06 Feb

Chris Borgen taxes me with not paying enough attention to the ways in which the responses of non-Anglo-American powers to the Anglo-Americans may reflect their own hopes and plans for the world, rather than a simple dislike of Anglo-American plans or values. I think the two are connected; people dislike the Anglo-Americans both because they don’t like what we have in mind and because our plans and activities frustrate hopes and wishes of their own. God and Gold deals with these issues at some length in the last section; rather...
06.02.08 | |

27 Jan

Nikolas Stürchler, the Head of International Humanitarian Law and International Criminal Justice Section at the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, has a new post at EJIL: Talk! discussing the ASP’s decision to completely exclude states parties from the crime of aggression unless they ratify the aggression amendments — the “opt-in” position advocated by a number of states, most notably the UK, Japan, and Canada. The post is very long and quite technical, so I won’t try to summarise it. Basically, Stürchler argues that the judges are still free to...
27.01.18 | |