Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
17 Jan Ohlin Response to Rona
Jens Ohlin has continued the conversation about IHL and IHRL at LieberCode. Here is a snippet, self-servingly chosen because I want to comment on it: It strikes me as curious that human rights activists are so quick to cabin CIL application of the IHL rules of IAC to NIAC. To my ear, it is one of the great advancements of the last few decades: that the rules of warfare must be respected and that no nation can ignore them simply because the armed conflict is internal. (Incidentally, this...
17 May Interview: Brigid Laffan on ‘Europe in the World: The Emergence of Collective Power Europe’
Until this summer, Brigid Laffan was director and professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and director of the Global Governance Programme at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, where she has worked since 2013. In 2018, Politico ranked Laffan, a long time professor of political science who grew up in Ireland, among the women who shape Europe. Laffan is a leading thinker on the dynamic of European integration. She has published a number of important books on Europe, such as Integration and Co-operation in Europe (1992), The...16 Apr Have we always been diagonal? A response to Osofsky’s “Is Climate Change ‘International’?”
[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...14 Nov MJIL Symposium: A Response to Spencer Zifcak by Thomas Weiss
[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...07 Feb A Response to Pierre-Hugues Verdier by Eric Pan
...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...12 May Guest Post: Strong Words, Weak Arguments – A Response to the Open Letter to the UN on Humanitarian Access to Syria (Part 2)
[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...
07 Oct On the Interpretability of Customary International Law: A Response to Nina Mileva and Marina Fortuna
[Odile Ammann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.] “Customary international law cannot be interpreted because it’s not written.” I have heard this objection many times, including from the most seasoned international lawyers. While the interpretability of customary international law (CIL) may seem less obvious than that of written laws, I do not think that the written or unwritten character of a legal act impacts its interpretability. Nina Mileva and Marina Fortuna’s recent post, which forcefully highlights the interpretability of CIL, is thus more...12 May Guest Post: Strong Words, Weak Arguments – A Response to the Open Letter to the UN on Humanitarian Access to Syria (Part 1)
[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,...12 Sep The Fallacy That Attacking a Judicial Institution and its Personnel Protects Americans: A Response to John Bolton’s Speech
[Jennifer Trahan is a Clinical Professor at the NYU Center for Global Affairs.] Monday, at the Federalist Society, National Security Adviser John Bolton delivered a major foreign policy address, devoted almost entirely to attacking the International Criminal Court, a court established to prosecute the most egregious crimes of concern to the international community. At a time when the US does indeed face many national security challenges, including North Korean nuclear weapons development, the topic was in itself an odd choice, but consistent with Bolton’s earlier preoccupation with the...06 Nov A Response to Alvaro Santos by Katherine V. Stone
...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...