Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...the WHO and scientists have long been warning of the increasing risks of zoonotic diseases. ‘The ultimate test of preparedness is response’ and certainly governments’ responses are now being considered and, as noted above, should be comprehensively reviewed ex post facto. Lessons must certainly be learned. However, national preparedness must also be honed and tested for future pandemics. This means reviewing and updating pandemic preparedness plans, generally that being those for seasonal influenza. Writing in December 2020, on the African response to COVID-19, Justice King highlights the importance of socio-economic...

...fact, I did mean “lawfare” in the sense Kevin’s discussants (Dov, el roam, and Mendieta) are using it: “lawfare” as strategic utilization of the law, which for me isn’t negative but rather value-neutral, and this is why in the post I contrasted it with “the quest for justice” or “embracing the law.” Strategy is simply neither of those, just as it isn’t “good” or “bad” – Strategy is only successful or unsuccessful. And as my original post indicated, to me the only plausible strategic role for the ICC in the...

...about ethnocentricity. He noted it when I first work-shopped the paper a couple of years earlier, and made me rethink my own position about crimes against humanity, and focus upon World War II and particularly the Nuremberg precedent. While the horror of the holocaust will never leave us, it is undoubtedly important to understand the terrible suffering of today’s victims of atrocity crimes and not to minimize their sufferings or their claims to justice. Today’s ICC owes much to the Nuremberg (and Tokyo) precedents; but its establishment, mission and mandate...

First and most importantly, my sincere thanks to Marko Milanovic and Pierre-Hugues Verdier for taking the time to offer such careful and insightful reactions to my work. I’m extremely fortunate to have them as “virtual” colleagues, and I appreciate the efforts of the YJIL editors and folks at Opinio Juris in creating a forum for this online exchange. As Marko and Pierre-Hugues note, I focus on the interpretation and application of constitutional and quasi-constitutional rights — what I call “domestic rights regimes” — by domestic courts. This is...

As a pastor of a church I find Professor Guiora’s words both challenging and problematic. Here are four points: 1. Professor Guiora writes, “Society has historically – unjustifiably and blindly – granted religion immunity.” What society? Separating “society” from “religion” is very much a modern issue. Society didn’t grant immunity to anything. Rather, society was shaped by religion and was pretty much identified religiously in the West and in the East until the beginnings of the critical/historical/scientific “Age of Reason” stirrings. In the West it was the Church...

[Dr. Ulf Linderfalk is a Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law at Lund University, Sweden. The first part of his comments can be found here.] In what sense does the VCLT give a description of the way to understand a treaty? The way Julian describes prevailing legal doctrine, the presumption against preparatory work is effectuated “by a set of threshold restrictions that relegate drafting history to ‘a carefully bounded and contingent role’, for use only … ‘when the text [of a treaty] cannot, in itself,...

I would like to thank Professor von der Dunk – who is a close friend and highly respected colleague – for taking the time to provide his thoughtful responses to my article ‘Fly Me to the Moon: How Will International Law Cope with Commercial Space Tourism’, published recently in the Melbourne Journal of International Law. Professor von der Dunk and I have worked in collaboration on several research projects and he is a very highly regarded scholar in matters relating to the international, and national, regulation of the use and...

...to assert the applicability of human rights law to address concerns over the existence of legal “black holes.” As a result, although the trend had begun well before 9/11, in the last decade the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Human Rights Committee (“HRC”) and the Committee Against Torture, the Human Rights Council, the General Assembly, and national courts and governments have been increasingly assertive in publicly recognizing that at least some human rights treaty obligations apply extraterritorially. The...

[Erin F. Delaney, a Research Fellow at Columbia Law School (she holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and a J.D. from the NYU School of Law), & Samuel Issacharoff, the Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law, respond to David Schleicher, What If Europe Held an Election and No One Cared?] Eurodemocracy Multilevel democracy is difficult. Voters have limited time and even less information. Political parties provide the indispensable integrative mechanism for the polity and bring order to the chaotic political marketplace. But...

[Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, responds to David Landau, The Reality of Social Rights Enforcement. This post is part of the Third Harvard International Law Journal/Opinio Juris Symposium.] David Landau’s article is an important contribution to a growing literature on the judicial role in enforcing social and economic rights. He joins others in noting that debate has ended over whether constitutions should include such rights and whether, if included, those rights should be judicially enforceable. (As does Landau, I put aside the U.S....

[ Frans G von der Dunk holds the Harvey & Susan Perlman Alumni and Othmer Chair of Space Law at the University of Nebraska College of Law.] The contribution of Professor Freeland to the important debate on the legal aspects of private manned spaceflights, as per his article ‘Fly Me to the Moon: How Will International Law Cope with Commercial Space Tourism’ is a thoughtful and enlightening exposé of some of the key legal issues involved in that debate, and I very much agree with the general thrust...

[Chiara Giorgetti is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law Center and a member of the International Arbitration Group at the Washington, D.C. office of White & Case.] I am very pleased to join this discussion on Professor Lea Brilmayer and Isaias Yemane Tesfalidet’s upcoming article on third State obligations and the enforcement of international law. In their article, Brilmayer and Tesfalidet argue that States have a positive obligation not to contribute to another State’s violation of a victim’s legal rights, and propose that liability is triggered only when...