In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

12 Jun

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...
12.06.09 | |

16 Apr

...& 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...
16.04.09 | |

12 Jun

[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....
12.06.09 | |

17 May

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...
17.05.22 | |

16 Apr

[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...
16.04.09 | |

14 Nov

[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...
14.11.12 | |

07 Feb

...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...
07.02.11 | |

12 May

[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...
12.05.14 | |

12 May

[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,...
12.05.14 | |

06 Sep

...Red Cross’s Nils Melzer, who so argued in an important book, Targeted Killing in International Law. And also Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell, who has argued this proposition (as well as an associated claim that all participation by CIA personnel in the use of force is an international crime). I cannot say that these claims — although heroically urged by the advocacy groups and their academic allies — have a basis in the law of war as the US (or really, leading war-fighting states) has traditionally understood it....
06.09.10 | |

12 Sep

[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...
12.09.18 | |

17 Jan

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...
17.01.12 | |