Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

Thanks to Roger Alford, Matt Waxman, Ken Anderson, Chris Borgen, and Peggy McGuiness for their interesting posts today. I wanted to respond to Roger’s very astute observation about 1993. We do write about the disaster on the national security side, but as he notes, Clinton also got NAFTA passed that year, which was a major achievement. It was really striking to us as we did the research for the book the difference between Clinton on economics and Clinton on national security in that first year. He was so confident of...

...coal-burning power plants . The administration bases its opposition to NSR primarily on the fact that the program has negatively affected energy projects, but Christine Todd Whitman (whom, Easterbrook also incorrectly cites in his favor) revealed in her new book It’s My Party, Too that “at one meeting, after hearing one person after another lay blame for our energy crisis squarely at EPA’s door, I asked them to prepare a list of energy projects that were being delayed because of environmental laws and regulations. Nobody ever did.” Fourth, cap-and-trade systems...

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 on...

[Gregory Gordon is Professor of Law, University of North Dakota School of Law.] I would like to begin by thanking Opinio Juris for inviting us to have this important discussion here about the crime of direct and public incitement to commit genocide. I would also like to congratulate Susan Benesch on her excellent article regarding this verbal harbinger and prerequisite of mass atrocity. Professor Benesch provides a much needed exploration of the more complex facets of incitement that will afford jurists, advocates, and would-be offenders greater clarity in...

...study of nationalism. (See especially Chapter 5 of my book, THE PARADOXES OF NATIONALISM: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ITS MEANING FOR CONTEMPORARY NATION BUILDING). My sense is that Susan talks about the sociological foundations of genocide because she wants to convince skeptical readers that criminalizing incitement should not be out of the question, even though it involves criminalizing speech. Susan points out that U.S. law criminalizes speech that is “likely to lead to imminent lawless action” (495). However, she finds this test too narrow in the context of genocide, because...

This is a wonderful opportunity to bring Islamic law into the legal debate in the United States beyond the superficial level at which it usually takes place. This is the more welcome for someone who has written a book on Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr as the most creative Islamic thinker of the 20th century (The Renewal of Islamic Law, Cambridge 1993), and now sees a second generation of Sadr scholars, like Professor Hamoudi, engaging seriously his work in American legal academia. In his article, Hamoudi uses Sadr’s work to show how...

First of all, welcome back! I always enjoy your contributions to OJ (and your scholarship generally), even when I disagree with you. So I hope you won’t think me too ungracious a host if I raise some (pointed) questions about your most recent post. I would be genuinely curious to hear your responses. I am, as I have pointed out ad nauseum, not an expert on international human rights law. So I’ll limit my comments to whether any of the actions you discuss would qualify either as genocide or as...

[Mark Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law.] Susan Benesch’s VJIL article is timely, thoughtful, and important. She insightfully sets out the catalytic relationship between hate propaganda and genocide. Her comparison of the methodological similarities between the Rwandan and Nazi German contexts is instructive. The mainstreaming of hate-mongering is a condition precedent for genocide to become truly massive. Consequently, if the criminal law could shut down hate-mongering before actual genocide – for example, by incapacitating the conflict entrepreneur...

...law. Blackstone’s commentary very clearly states that applying the law of nations to cases involving individuals creates domestic law. This is why I have argued that all “war crimes” adjudicated by military commissions prior to the 1949 Geneva Conventions were actually domestic, common law crimes, an approach maintained in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (and in the catch-all provision of the Military Commissions Act). My unpublished opinion is that their extraterritorial application to enemy foreign nationals is probably one of the earliest forms of the still-hotly-contested passive nationality jurisdiction....

...international institutions in the Asia-Pacific, calls are being made for global responses to the virus to disaggregate the data related to outbreaks based on sex, age and disability in order to understand the ‘gendered differences in exposure and treatment and to design differential preventive measures’. In keeping with the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s (IASC) tool, this would seem to re-inscribe existing gendered norms onto any approach to the pandemic and may entrench gendered stereotypes in our response. While there is undoubtedly some merit in collating this data, it falls short of...

...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...

[Jaw-perng Wang is Professor of Law at National Taiwan University] I am very impressed that a foreign scholar, especially a common-law trained one, could have a precise picture of Taiwan’s criminal procedure and its history and recent reforms. Without spending tremendous time and effort, an article that accurately and meticulously reports Taiwan’s criminal procedure, like this one, could not possibly be produced. In addition, I must confess that several parts of the detailed report of Taiwan’s practice did not come to my attention until after reading this article....