Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

[Nathan Sayre is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley] I join J.B. Ruhl in applauding Hari Osofsky’s effort to bring geographical and legal scholarship into a constructive dialogue to address climate change. Her analysis draws important empirical and theoretical lessons from two case studies by illuminating the complex role of litigation in driving processes of regulatory rescaling—a critical role given the unprecedented and urgent challenges that global warming poses to existing legal and institutional frameworks. To meet these challenges, society—at...

[Thomas G Weiss is a Presidential Professor of Political Science at The CUNY Graduate Center and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Professor Spencer Zifcak’s article on the international reactions to Libya and Syria is thorough and thoughtful, and well worth reading for the treasure trove of documentation. But I was frankly surprised by his unsurprising conclusion that ‘judgments as to whether and when to...

...result in a lowering of regulatory standards, exposing the host jurisdiction to little additional threat of systemic risk, fraud or other regulatory failures. The problem is that developing metrics of comparability is difficult, and efforts to date have been ad hoc. Such determinations require an analysis that go beyond examining what rules are “on the books” to the effectiveness of the regulator in promoting compliance with such rules (see, e.g., the literature on enforcement intensity) and the relative sophistication of affected market participants. Until we develop a better understanding of...

[Naz Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement Project at Harvard Law School. This post is written in her personal capacity and does not represent the views of the CHE Project] Part 1 can be found here. Humanitarian Concerns Perhaps as significant as the legal errors in the letter, the authors seem to take no account of the security implications of their recommendation. Given its actions thus far, including its attacks on its own population and many medical humanitarians, it would not be at all...

[Naz Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement Project at Harvard Law School. This post is written in her personal capacity and does not represent the views of the CHE Project] There is no shortage of profound questions arising out of the armed conflict in Syria. Yet whether the reported United Nations legal analysis concluding that the UN needs the consent of the Syrian authorities before it can undertake humanitarian relief actions on Syrian territory is not one of them. As international law questions go,...

...oversimplified claims of the legal origins theoretical framework that underlines the DB project, in which economic progress is equated with common law regimes (seen as “flexible”) and economic backwardness is associated with civil law regimes (seen as “rigid”). Even more useful is Santos’ demonstration that by focusing only on formal written law, the DB indicators badly mischaracterize the labor law regimes they purport to describe. Many factors make the law “in action” depart from the “law on the books,” as legal sociologists have long known. Santos uses examples from Mexico...

...limits and take note of their responsibilities towards staff. It is my personal view that the landscape of international criminal justice institutions, the closing of institutions and poor coordination between them is largely to blame for the issues before the ICC that have been highlighted by Professor Guilfoyle and the IER. I am certain that creating more opportunities is a better route forward than cutting staff benefits and undermining job security. This approach reflects fairness to them and to their years of dedication to the field, and it provides institutional...

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...

As a general matter, we agree with Professor Weber’s comments, especially in relation to development and climate change. While we have not in this article focused on developmental aspects of the global financial architecture, in fact, we both view this as the fundamental goal.[1] Development however is not a simple objective and no single set of solutions to the development challenge has emerged. In the global economic architecture today, developmental issues are addressed through the Millennium Development Goals (‘MDGs’), a huge range of multilateral, domestic and non-governmental...

We are very grateful to Professors Ginsburg, Vandenbergh, Cohen, and Wiener for engaging in this dialogue with us. The value of discussing these issues with such leading scholars in the field cannot be overstated. Professor Ginsburg’s very helpful comments push us to focus on two main points: (1) the U.S. has similar internal dynamics that make committing to a climate change agreement difficult; and (2) China can more easily implement an agreement when it commits to “environmental policy . . . over growth.” Professor Wiener’s post makes the...

...Stewart and I argued in our book Reconstructing Climate Policy (2003), is through international allowance trading, with China receiving an implicit side payment in extra headroom allowances, and using these to trade back to the US and Europe in return for technology. Thus, the side payment would be delivered in myriad competitive private transactions, a much more cost-effective, and more politically palatable, approach; indeed, US firms would be selling technology to China in return for allowances obtained at lower cost than domestic US abatement. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly from...

[Professor Brian Cheffins is the S.J. Berwin Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law] As Prof. Bruner points out in his insightful Article, in the literature on comparative corporate governance, there is a tendency to treat the United States and the United Kingdom as being very similar across key dimensions. He shows convincingly that in fact there are key differences between corporate governance in the two countries, focusing in particular on greater “shareholder-centrism” in British public companies in comparison to their U.S. counterparts....