Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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...

[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 for...

[Tom Ginsburg is a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School] Thanks for this opportunity to respond to the Article by Professors Abebe and Masur. My learned colleagues are certainly correct that, notwithstanding its status as a unitary and authoritarian state, China is an internally complicated place, with substantial de facto control at the provincial level. Besides the East-West cleavages that Professors Abebe and Masur focus on, there are other internal tensions among different levels of government, different governmental agencies at each level, and different ideological groups...

As a general matter, we agree with Professor Weber’s comments, especially in relation to development and climate change. While we have not in this article focused on developmental aspects of the global financial architecture, in fact, we both view this as the fundamental goal.[1] Development however is not a simple objective and no single set of solutions to the development challenge has emerged. In the global economic architecture today, developmental issues are addressed through the Millennium Development Goals (‘MDGs’), a huge range of multilateral, domestic and non-governmental organizations...

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 a...

...for Governments to already have contacts and collaborations with cultural actors so that avenues for dialogue are already in place before crises arise. In fact, States are obliged by international law to consult with community actors regarding health goods, facilities, and services. Rather than thinking only about law and policy to implement rights and crisis response measures, States need to also use the rich cultural resources and assets available. In this way my argument is for response measures to go beyond both the law as well as the State, with...

responses at the online blog by her and by Brad Roth. I have finally managed to get a response together, which is quite long and will run in three posts. The other responses are linked at the beginning of that post, as well. I have to thank publicly EJILTalk for running such a long response, which in many ways is practically a new essay – but especially Amrita Kapur and Brad Roth for reading so closely and with such nuance my original article. I’m very grateful to them for so...

...Arc-style. David Landau responded to Mark Tushnet’s comments on his article “The Reality of Social Rights Enforcement” in a final installment of the Third Harvard International Law/Opinio Juris Symposium that took place earlier in the year. This week’s main event was our first symposium with the Leiden Journal of International Law, at the occasion of the Journal’s 25th birthday. The symposium kicked off with a discussion of two articles on the impact of the ICJ’s Nicaragua judgment, which also celebrated its 25th anniversary. The articles, by Lori Damrosch and Marcelo...

Bobby Chesney has graciously responded at Lawfare to my post about detention in non-international armed confilct (NIAC). Unfortunately, I think Chesney’s response not only misconstrues what Steve Vladeck and I have been arguing, but also demonstrates some important misconceptions about IHL. To begin with, we need to understand exactly what we are arguing about. As Steve pointed out in one of his early posts, Sen. Lindsey Graham’s proposed “Terrorist Detention Review Reform Act would permit the government to detain without trial anyone who “has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against...

...the US government had used the law for centuries to systematically persecute Black Americans and had committed unspeakable acts of violence against them. If that mistreatment differed from the Nazis’ mistreatment of Jews and other groups, it was a difference of intensity, not kind. To his lasting credit, Taylor eventually charged purely peacetime crimes against humanity in two of the 12 NMT cases. None of those charges were successful, but they led the Justice tribunal (albeit only in dicta) to affirm their legitimacy, paving the way for the modern nexus-less...

[I. Glenn Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Law and the Co-Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.] This post is part of the Virginia Journal of International Law Symposium, Volume 52, Issues 1 and 2. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I have relied on the work of each of these commentators and think of them as scholarly partners, so I am very grateful for their kind words and their comments on my...

...Court of Justice pertaining to declaration of the unilateral declaration of independence in respect of Kosovo: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/141/15738.pdf) as well as the contention that self-determination has grown into a principle that regulates secession. There is no doubt that self-determination has significantly impacted the creation of states in the second half of the 20th century. That legal principle bears upon factual developments which are the essence of the political project behind international law. It is however going one step too far to claim that the factual effect that self-determination can bear automatically...