Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

[Justine Nolan is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales] I am in concurrence with the timely article co-authored by Odette Murray, David Kinley and Chip Pitts in the Melbourne Journal of International Law and agree that the death of the Alien Torts Statute (‘ATS’) owes more to exaggerated rumours than legal substance. The article dissects the legal reasoning of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum [1] and argues that the majority...

In Extraterritorial Application of Human Rights Treaties: Law, Principles, Policy, Marko Milanovic has written an illuminating and comprehensive analysis of the increasingly contested question of the geographic scope of human rights treaties. Of course, this is a dynamic area of law—as Marko notes, many of the cases he examines are of quite recent vintage—so undoubtedly he will be at work on second addition in a few years. But for now, this book provides a closer reading and a more detailed, one might even say exhaustive, survey of the relevant issues...

I am grateful to Mr. Li and Professor Wang for their thoughtful comments and am flattered by their praise. The very fact that a lawyer and a law professor speak of their criminal justice system with such insight and candor highlights one of the most laudatory aspects of Taiwan’s legal reform project: A transparent, open debate over the best path for Taiwan. During the course of my research, I was deeply impressed by the transcripts of lengthy legislative debates during which a number of experts from the judiciary, executive branch,...

[Dr. Janina Dill is a Hedley Bull Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations and Research Fellow in Politics at Merton College, Oxford] I am very grateful to Gabby Blum and Chris Kutz for their thoughtful comments on my paper. We agree on the fundamental challenge: killing combatants in accordance with the principle of distinction under International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is morally problematic. In my paper I engage the preferred remedy of a growing number of philosophers, which is to distinguish between individuals who are liable...

Professor Bodansky is absolutely right that the success of U.S. climate change policy depends on whether our leaders can align domestic and international efforts. Unless the United States does its fair share, other nations will not do theirs. And yet a purely international solution – untethered to domestic political realities – has little chance of securing U.S. participation. Bodansky’s own solution is a two-tier target – an initial level of effort that the United States pursues unilaterally, without pre-condition, and a second, more ambitious, mitigation target that the...

...& Policy symposium organized by Dan Mandelker and Dan Tarlock on New Directions in Environmental Law. The symposium explored how U.S. environmental regulation should develop through paired presentations on the history of major statutes and possibilities for the future. One thing that struck me throughout the dialogue was the complex interplay of science, scale, and law taking place in each of these substantive contexts. I think that we can learn from the experiments in horizontal, vertical, and diagonal governance that these statutes create—both in the provisions themselves and in the...

[Daniel Bodansky is a Professor at the University of Georgia Law School] In the international climate change negotiations, new ideas are a scarce commodity. After almost twenty years of intensive work, most of the low-hanging fruit have already been plucked, and progress tends to be more incremental – a refinement to the possible types of emissions targets here, a new variation on a financing scheme there – these are the focus of attention. So Nigel Purvis’s proposal to enact US Climate Protection Authority legislation is no small achievement....

[ 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...

...Prevention of Genocide Juan Mendez. It is also the subject of a standing and reaffirmed order by the International Court of Justice against Azerbaijan to end the blockade, which Azerbaijan has refused to comply with.  Nor does Dr Bagheri take into account the widely reported background of long-standing Azerbaijani state-sponsored incitement of hatred against Armenians when Nagorno-Karabakh fell under Azerbaijan’s exclusive control (see e.g. ECRI Reports 2002, 2006, 2011, 2016, 2023; CERD Committee 2022, para. 4(d)). Live witness testimony during the mass exodus further confirms the Armenians’ experience of having left...

[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...

It’s an honor to have two so distinguished scholars comment on my article. As always, I learn from reading their commentary and I thank each for his insights. Two quick reactions. First, Professor Johnson raises an interesting semantic question (which I do not address in the article): If a state “unsigns” a treaty, is it still a signatory? Professor Johnson is surely correct that a state cannot re-write history by purporting to expunge its signature as a matter of official record. Further, liability that a state incurs...

Odette Lienau’s Who is the “Sovereign” in Sovereign Debt? provocatively argues that Chief Justice Taft’s method of analysis in his 1923 arbitral award in the so-called Tinoco arbitration offers a useful approach to controversies over so-called odious debts owed by states, that is, debts incurred for purposes unrelated to the well-being of the population of the state responsible for the debt. Lienau argues that Taft applied what she calls a “rule of law” approach, making the enforceablility of the obligations in question in that arbitration dependent upon the compliance of...