Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

Over the past couple of years, a number of scholars — including me — have debated whether IHL implicitly authorises detention in non-international armed conflict (NIAC.) The latest important intervention in the debate comes courtesy of Daragh Murray in the Leiden Journal of International Law. As the article’s abstract makes clear, Murray is firmly in the “IHL authorises” camp: On the basis of current understandings of international law – and the prohibition of arbitrary detention in particular – it is concluded that international humanitarian law must be interpreted...

[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...

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...

...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...

[Daragh Murray is a Lecturer at the University of Essex School of Law and Human Rights Centre.] Thanks to Kevin for his post engaging with some of the issues discussed in my recent article on detention authority in non-international armed conflict. I would like to take this opportunity to provide a quick overview of my argument as relevant to this post, to discuss Kevin’s prohibition v. regulation argument and some of the other points he raised, and to highlight a key proposal developed in the article but not...

[Matthew Waxman is an Associate Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School.] I am delighted to comment on Professor Blum’s provocative and thoughtful Article . The Article highlights in new ways a fundamental tension within international humanitarian law (IHL): that this body of law that disallows “lesser-evil” analysis in many contexts is itself a giant exercise of lesser-evil judgment, that the risks of prolonging and legitimizing warfare are worth the cost of protecting some humanitarian interests during it. Professor Blum injects new thinking to some long-running...

[Jens Iverson is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University and a Visiting Professor/Lecturer at Vermont Law School, Santa Clara University School of Law, and University of California College of the Law, San Francisco] A previous post on Opinio Juris, Threats of Force and Attribution: The Case of Incoming Heads of State, casts doubt on the legal seriousness of Trump’s statements before returning to the US Presidency. The apparent sources of the doubt are twofold: first, whether the threats are “credible,” and second, “whether statements made by an...

[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...

...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...

responses at the online blog by her and by Brad Roth. I have finally managed to get a response together, which is quite long and will run in three posts. The other responses are linked at the beginning of that post, as well. I have to thank publicly EJILTalk for running such a long response, which in many ways is practically a new essay – but especially Amrita Kapur and Brad Roth for reading so closely and with such nuance my original article. I’m very grateful to them for so...

[Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. This post is a response to the recent Trump Administration and International Law Symposium hosted on Opinio Juris.] Can international law save itself from Donald Trump? Since Election Night 2016, that question has haunted me across many issue areas. Professor Craig Martin and the Washburn Law Journal editors generously invited me to offer an initial answer in their recently published symposium issue in an article entitled “The Trump Administration and International Law.” As I prepare my book-length...

on this blog here, on EJIL: Talk! here and OxHRH here). Whilst acknowledging that the majority of the derogations notified to the Council of Europe have now been withdrawn, the judges nevertheless expressed concerns over their usage. They remarked that ECHR derogations should not become commonplace and reaffirmed that they do not provide states with carte blanche to adopt any measures they wish in response to the pandemic. The ECtHR judges set down four general principles to be followed by states adopting measures in response to the pandemic: 1) Measures...