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Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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 | |

02 Feb

I would first like to thank Professor Guy Mundlak for generously taking the time to respond to my Article, and Opinio Juris for hosting this forum. Professor Mundlak is very correct to note that over time civil liberties and socioeconomic matters have become more intertwined. What’s more, the overlapping identities and realms in which workers function mean that to be protected and empowered in the sphere of work, they must also be protected in other spheres of human functioning. The same holds true in the inverse. Accordingly, the...
02.02.10 | |

30 Jul

...pressing need; do the long-term benefits outweigh the long-term harms; is it the least harmful alternative; and are all feasible measures taken to minimise harm” with “inter-species justice or the interests of the Earth community as a whole” as the external metric. In the definition of ecocide proposed by the Independent Expert Panel (‘IEP’), this balancing manifests in the ‘wanton’ requirement, namely, that conduct be committed with: “reckless disregard for damage which would be clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated”. This second of our two-part...
30.07.26 | and |

30 Jul

...a manner that is ‘misanthropic’, meaning an approach that “exclude[s] human wellbeing and suffering from consideration”. He asserts that ‘ecocentric’ must be given a “human-inclusive” interpretation. Ecocide then should necessarily involve the balancing of human interests (namely, “human survival, suffering, and well-being”) against non-human interests (in accordance with “inter-species justice or the interests of the Earth community as a whole”). As the misanthropic charge has been appended to one of the authors of this two-part piece, we consider it important to clarify that it rests on a fundamental misreading of...
30.07.26 | and |

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 | |

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 | |

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 | |

27 Apr

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...
27.04.20 | |