Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
08 Mar A Response to Milanovic and Verdier on Rights Beyond Borders
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...
20 Dec On Forcing Civilians to Remain in Hostile Zones: The Prohibition of Shielding and the Corresponding Obligations of an Attacking Party Under International Humanitarian Law
[Chris McQuade is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Law at the University of Portsmouth. He holds a PhD in International Law from the University of Sussex and researches in the fields of public international law, international humanitarian law and international and domestic human rights law.] In response to the October 7 attack by Hamas, the Israeli army has engaged in an intense military campaign in the Gaza strip over the past three months. As the campaign has escalated in its ferocity, so too has criticism of the Israeli response (among...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...
28 Oct Winter is [Not] Coming: Game of Thrones as an Allegory for Climate Change & International Politics
...Game of Thrones functions as a powerful tool to demonstrate multiple facets of lacking climate action—from the repeated defeat and disillusionment experienced by those seeking to rally a collective response, to the surge of hope following an agreement to act, to the decision of certain nefarious actors to deliberately feign their cooperation and seek to manipulate the responses others for their own material benefit. There is further power in this mode of portraying themes surrounding collective action in a Sci-Fi television series that is so thoroughly apolitical, because it creates...30 Jan Investment Protection in Extraordinary Times: A Response
The recent article by Burke-White and von Staden raises critical and timely issues about international economic law and treaty interpretation. The paper acknowledges challenges posed to the institutional legitimacy of investment treaty dispute resolution (which I have written about elsewhere) that are caused by different tribunals coming to different interpretations of the same or similar treaty provisions. It also considers the difficulties for international law when tribunals interpret treaty provisions in a manner that negates agreed areas of state responsibility and instead shifts to an analysis based...14 Oct Guest Post: Air Strikes in Syria–Questions Surrounding the Necessity and Proportionality Requirements in the Exercise of Self-Defense
...to reinforce the argument of Tams and Devaney concerning the relationship between geography and self-defense actions against irregular forces. By way of contrast, several examples can be found during the UN era where a state condemned the remoteness of the response taken in self-defense against both state and non-state actors. For example, when the US claimed that its 1986 aerial bombing of Libyan territory had been validly undertaken in response to imminent attacks from Libyan-sponsored terrorists (UN SCOR, 2674th mtg, UN Doc S/PV.2674 (15 April 1986); Stanimir A. Alexandrov, Self-Defense...25 Jan A Response to David Sloss by Carlos Vázquez
of non-self-executing treaties was relevant only to Chief Justice Marshall and one other Justice, and that was because these two Justices construed Article 8 to require the United States to recognize these grants as if the land had in fact belonged to Spain between 1803 and 1819. These two Justices were inclined to accept such a construction because a declaration was appended to the treaty specifying that, notwithstanding Article 8, three specified grants did not need to be recognized. One of these three specifically excluded grants lay in territory that,...
09 Dec COVID-19 and Africa Symposium: The COVID-19 Pandemic–A Dark Cover for Cracking Down on Free Expression in Eswatini and Zimbabwe
a state of disaster, while Eswatini declared a state of emergency. Despite these differences in approach, COVID-19 response measures implemented by both countries are legally required to comply with the above described standards of necessity and proportionality. As part of their COVID-19 response measures, both Eswatini and Zimbabwe enacted regulations which restricted freedom of expression by criminalising the spreading of false information. In Eswatini, the regulations criminalised the “[spreading] of any rumour or unauthenticated information regarding COVID-19” and spreading “any rumour or unauthentic information regarding any measure taken by the...31 Jan Competition and Control: A Response to Professor Cogan
...two tribunals that Jacob identifies as immune from competition and therefore at risk of “market failure.” (pp.444-45) The recently-concluded Treaty of Lisbon delegates new powers to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to interpret the now legally binding Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union as well as EU criminal justice agreements. A similar trend is underway in the European human rights regime. Until 1998, the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) was optional. That changed with the ratification of Protocol 11, which made jurisdiction compulsory....