Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
09 Mar Weekend Roundup: March 2-8, 2013
week: the impact of international human rights treaties on domestic constitutions. Christopher N.J. Roberts’ comments wondered whether the UDHR can be considered a template for domestic changes and what the impact of domestic legal culture is on the understanding of similar rights. Tom Ginsburg responded here. The second article of the symposium was Natalie Lockwood’s article on International Vote Buying, for which William Burke-White provided the response. He questioned whether a legal prohibition on vote buying would be effective, but applauded the article for its re-examination of the role of...06 Feb Response to Michael Lind
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...27 Apr “No Neutral Men”: Sharma’s Reductionist Response to My Post
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...03 Nov Salvaging the Charming Betsy in ATS Cases: A Response to Rio Tinto
...law. Blackstone’s commentary very clearly states that applying the law of nations to cases involving individuals creates domestic law. This is why I have argued that all “war crimes” adjudicated by military commissions prior to the 1949 Geneva Conventions were actually domestic, common law crimes, an approach maintained in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (and in the catch-all provision of the Military Commissions Act). My unpublished opinion is that their extraterritorial application to enemy foreign nationals is probably one of the earliest forms of the still-hotly-contested passive nationality jurisdiction....11 Feb A Response to Robert Ahdieh by Eric A. Posner
[Eric A. Posner, co-author of Universal Exceptionalism in International Law with Anu Bradford, responds to Robert Ahdieh] I am grateful for Professor Ahdieh’s illuminating comments on my paper with Anu Bradford. Ahdieh offers three interpretations of the charge of U.S. exceptionalism: Degreeism: The United States does not always win, but it wins more often than Europe and China do. Exceptionalism is a matter of degree, but it still exists. I don’t think that the traditional notion of American exceptionalism permits this interpretation, but it is possible that people...27 Feb A Response to Kontorovich and Gallagher About Piracy (Updated)
...League of Nations report and the Harvard commentary during the drafting of what would become the High Seas Convention’s definition of piracy. To her credit, Maggie acknowledges (in the article in the Journal of International Criminal Justice she mentions in her comment) that the Harvard commentary does not limit the “exception” to piracy to recognized belligerencies. But she misunderstands the nature of belligerent recognition (emphasis mine): The commentary to the Harvard Draft suggests the ‘private ends’ requirement was originally intended to exclude from the definition of piracy only the acts...11 Oct A Response to Kevin Heller (Part 2)
In a prior post, I responded to some of Kevin Heller’s criticism of the professors’ amicus brief recently filed in the Nestle ATS case. Specifically, that post addressed issues arising from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Here I’ll take up Kevin’s criticism based on rulings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). To frame the argument, it’s important to emphasize that, as Julian Ku noted earlier, the brief does not see the ICTY as a primary source of customary international law. Customary...