Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

[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,...

...“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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

But they are non-neutral in favour of international justice, not impunity for the state in which they happened to be born. In fact, there is reason to believe — and this was the basic point of my post, which Sharma ignores — that individuals from the P-3 may be uniquely well-suited to investigating crimes committed by their home states, given their familiarity with the political, economic, and social structures therein. After all, one of the most compelling criticisms of the ICC’s “distant justice” is that OTP investigations, in Africa and...

...international law scholars are discussing in these days and how all of this is evidence that a Tallinn Manual 3.0 is needed, but will not give any definitive answer to the issues that still involve international (cyber) law. The politicians The Hill published an interesting article that summarizes some first responses by US politicians to this act. It is striking as their positions do no align with past actions conducted by the US Government in cyberspace and do not reflect international law. Sen. Dick Durbin’s statement that “[t]his is virtually...

...“state” (because I had the privilege of looking through some of the books from his personal collection and some notes that he wrote in some of the books – which were housed in the Judge Advocate General’s School in Charlottesville). It is enough to know that Oppenheim was wrong. Perhaps “readers” here can disclose other examples of treaties involving non”state” actors Christiana quotes the Martens clause (see Martens above) from the 1899 Hague Convention, which was mirrored in the 1907 Hague Convention No. IV (all around the time of Oppenheim’s...

[Guy Mundlak is a Professor at Tel Aviv University Buchmann School of Law] I opted for law school because I wanted to take part in the practice of human rights. Several years later I found myself deeply engrossed in the study of labor law. At the time, Israel was still considered to be strongly collective, solidary, and densely covered by collective agreements. Being organized was not a contested topic. However, the rights of Palestinians, minorities and identity groups were considered to be fragile. Over time, I learned that...

We are very grateful to Professors Ginsburg, Vandenbergh, Cohen, and Wiener for engaging in this dialogue with us. The value of discussing these issues with such leading scholars in the field cannot be overstated. Professor Ginsburg’s very helpful comments push us to focus on two main points: (1) the U.S. has similar internal dynamics that make committing to a climate change agreement difficult; and (2) China can more easily implement an agreement when it commits to “environmental policy . . . over growth.” Professor Wiener’s post makes the...