In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

23 Nov

...its mandates and guidelines. On the other hand, legitimacy is less than law since without the “officialization” and the operational dimension that law constitutes, legitimacy is no more than an idea and cannot be made a reality. A second element which requires further elaboration is the relationship between legitimacy and justice. Professor Thakur alludes to the link between justice and legitimacy, the latter being namely an expression of the former. But what about the connection between power and legitimacy and what this means for legitimacy’s ability to serve a justice...
23.11.10 | |

12 Feb

I thank Professor C. Ford Runge for his comment on my article and agree with his analysis that places biofuels within a larger picture. From the Brazilian perspective, such heavy subsidies used by the United States and the European Union constitute the very “Gordian knot” of the negotiations in the Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organization. Naturally, that does not apply only to Brazil, but to all developing countries whose agricultural exports are heavily taxed. Ethanol from Brazil is just the newest product to face that...
12.02.10 | |

12 Feb

[C. Ford Runge is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law at the University of Minnesota.] Mairon G. Bastos Lima is to be congratulated for his coherent and ambitious proposal to rationalize the governance of biofuels through multilateral applications of the Rio and Good Governance principles. As he correctly observes, biofuels policies are highly nationalistic and lack even a rudimentary multilateral structure. Although he is right in his criticism, and constructive in his proposed alternatives, the analysis should be placed in a larger perspective. Biofuels...
12.02.10 | |

31 Aug

...— we have heard this, and been horrified by the results, so many times before. Despite what the title of my op-ed implies, there are numerous ways the US could continue to try to limit Assad’s capacity to harm his people that do not involve bombing Syria. Hathaway and Shapiro suggest some of the possibilities. Richard Falk has outlined clearly the risks, drawbacks, and dangers of a military response against Assad. The more considered response would be to intensify economic and diplomatic pressure on Assad and his supporters abroad. My...
31.08.13 | |

23 Jan

[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....
23.01.12 | |

07 Jun

The Office of the Prosecutor has filed its response to Libya’s challenge to the admissibility of the cases against Saif Gaddafi and Abdullah al-Senussi. There are a number of interesting aspects to the response. First, it says nothing about the case of al-Senussi. That’s a curious omission, given that the response specifically points out with regard to Saif (para. 41) that he remains in the custody of the Zintan rebels, making it possible that Libya is “unable” to prosecute him. If there is an open question about Libya’s ability to...
07.06.12 | |

08 Dec

[Marko Milanovic is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Nottingham School of Law.] In their timely article Brilmayer and Tesfalidet address an important issue of general international law – when should states bear obligations to either put an end to or not contribute to violations of international law by other states, even when the obligation in question is not owed to them specifically. They challenge the orthodox view that by and large it is not any one state’s business whether third states comply with their obligations...
08.12.11 | |

16 Apr

[David Orozco is an Assistant Professor of Business Law at Michigan Technical University] Professors Bird and Chaudhry provide an insightful and timely analysis of European Law related to the repackaging and relabeling of grey goods, specifically pharmaceutical products. The analysis navigates readers through the morass of legal confusion and uncertainty in this area of international law. A couple of questions were raised by the paper that I would specifically like to address to the authors. First, given that the property system has provided little legal certainty in this...
16.04.10 | |

11 Jun

My thanks to Mohsen al Attar for his comments on my Article, and to the editors of Opinio Juris and the Yale Journal of International Law for organizing this symposium. Mohsen al Attar’s comments bring the historical critique of global capitalist arrangements to the contemporary project of human rights, particularly the under-recognized “sub-set” of economic and social rights. He responds to the conceptual micro-study of the minimum core idea, demonstrated in Parts II to IV of my Article, by emphasizing its final conceptual step. This analysis moves upwards and outwards,...
11.06.08 | |

01 Mar

...of Justice (ICJ), assuming the proper jurisdictional and other requisites are met. The “circumstances precluding wrongfulness” provisions of the International Law Commission’s 2001 draft on State responsibility provide the following among such circumstances: consent, force majeure, necessity—and self-defense “in conformity with the Charter”. All could be invoked as defenses by a person accused of having committed the crime of aggression before a trial chamber of the ICC which would presumably have to decide on the merits of such defenses and, in that event, would inextricably be called upon to decide...
01.03.10 | |

20 Nov

...of the applicable law. Like the European Court of Justice, Professor de Wet seeks to apply European legal standards to the Security Council context: here, the right to effective judicial protection under EU law. Yet it is important to ask: is judicial review really an appropriate model of recourse against Security Council decisions? One need only contemplate the likelihood of the European Court of Justice being able to achieve the hurdle it sets for itself (and other domestic courts) in paragraph 115 of the Kadi II judgment (namely, to obtain...
20.11.13 | |

21 Oct

Elena Baylis Thanks to Opinio Juris and to YJIL for giving me the opportunity to comment on Tara Melish’s article, From Paradox to Subsidiarity: The United States and Human Rights Treaty Bodies. I have long been a fan of Tara’s work, and so it’s a pleasure to have the chance to respond to her new piece. In this article, Tara persuasively argues for two fundamental shifts in our understanding of the “U.S. human rights paradox.” She claims: 1. That the US position on international human rights is...
21.10.09 | |