Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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...

...of non-international armed conflict, it seems plausible that Al Warafi could refute his detention under international humanitarian law. Although the Court had correctly ruled that Article 24 did not apply, it did so on misguided grounds. In Al Warafi’s case, Article 24 was inapplicable because the conflict was not of a nature to trigger its application, nor was the petitioner a proper subject of this provision. Although Justice Brown identifies common Article 3 at the appropriate framework for considering the legality of Al Warafi’s detention in his concurring opinion for...

Let me begin by thanking Opinio Juris and the Yale International Law Journal for hosting this online symposium. In “Protecting Rights Online,” Professor Molly Beutz Land has written a highly interesting article that seeks to bridge the disciplinary and doctrinal divide between the human rights and access to knowledge (A2K) movements. The article is well-written, accessible and provocative. It has made an important contribution to the debate about issues lying at the intersection of human rights and global information governance. It is particularly refreshing to find Molly staying away from...

[ Joris van de Riet is a PhD candidate in jurisprudence at Leiden Law School. He holds LLM degrees in Public International Law and in Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law from Leiden University.] In a two-part post for this blog, Thomas Grant has argued that it is both possible and desirable to remove the Russian Federation from the UN Security Council (see Part One and Part Two). Although he is not the only one arguing that the Russian Federation’s presence on the Security Council is illegitimate –...

[Gideon Boas is an Associate Professor in the Monash Law School and a former Senior Legal Officer at the ICTY.] This article deals carefully with the Lubanga proceedings before the ICC, and in particular the difficulty caused by the Prosecution collecting information through the extensive use of confidentiality agreements under Article 54(3)(e) of the Rome Statute. One of the great difficulties confronting prosecutors in international war crimes trials is the collection of reliable evidence with which to build their cases and to secure conviction. Such investigations invariably occur...

[Robert Ahdieh is a Professor at Emory Law School] At the outset, my thanks to the editors of the Virginia Journal of International Law for inviting me to contribute to this symposium, to my friends at Opinio Juris for hosting it, and to Professor Tushnet for his valuable contribution to ongoing debates about constitutionalism, globalization, and their interrelationship. Needless to say, Professor Tushnet’s essay posits a bold claim: that we are moving inexorably toward a globalized constitutional law. I am deeply sympathetic to this claim – not merely as a...