Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

For a while there, it looked as if there might be a real fight over Harold Koh’s nomination as State Department Legal Adviser. The Republicans have been casting about for a nomination that they could defeat on some issue of principle (that is, over something not involving a nominee’s tax returns), along the lines of Lani Guinier’s failed nomination to the Clinton Justice Department. It might also be useful for them to pick up a rallying call. Anti-internationalism has looked pretty promising. As fringe elements started taking shots at Koh,...

...the lingua franca record of the resolution of past international conflicts. yan Response...Tony D'Amato's post, seems to me, adds up to the proposition that we can't take the terms of the law out of their context. That would reasonably include their historical context. Considering that context, I just don't see how the Charter members could have countenanced the idea that the great powers could take it upon themselves to 1] determine if international law had been violated and 2] use military force in response to uphold, in some sense, that...

...calls were all the more poignant given that he openly admitted that he was blinded by the remnants of war in the 1990s. Despite repeated pleas for engagement throughout the war, which saw some 5,000 military personnel and several hundred civilians killed or missing, the international community appear to have had limited influence over the conduct of the conflict or the ceasefire negotiations. The Council of Europe’s cautious response to the recent conflict serves as a reminder of the systemic problem of operational ‘grey zones’ in the CoE area. What...

...is no mention of capture anywhere in that commentary.” It is a remarkable rhetorical move what level of specification Heller demands here (an explicit reference to “capture”). Just as sufficient for our purposes, the Commentaries to Article 35 discuss unnecessary killing. Indeed, as Heller knows well (from my EJIL article and my response to Heller 1.0 and my responses to Corn et al), the Commentaries do refer earlier to the rule that “‘the kind of force which is necessary to compel the submission of the enemy’” should minimize the unnecessary...

...Palestine and Israel”. The Palestinian response to the Court’s request was that “the [s]tatement was not made as part of the record of these proceedings and did not in any way purport to, nor does it, legally affect the question presently before the Chamber.” The Palestinian response further called for the Court to “act decisively and expeditiously in rendering its [d]ecision so that the Prosecution can proceed with its investigation.” The Palestinian position was backed by the ICC Prosecutor who reiterated that she “does not consider that the Statement has...

Jonathan Adler, a blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy, has asked me what I think about the editorial that Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, published yesterday in the New York Times criticizing the organization’s coverage of Israel. My basic response: although I disagree with much of what Bernstein has to say, his criticisms must give anyone pause, because he obviously cares deeply about the organization. Before I turn to what I disagree with, it’s interesting to note that Bernstein seems to acknowledge that Israel has in the past...

...deterrence—whether Ukraine and its allies should coordinate to limit Russia’s access to the popular bank messaging clearinghouse facilitated by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Telecommunication known as SWIFT. Without commenting on the possibility of a SWIFT ban itself, he urged the world to be united in introducing sanctions. On February 24, 2022, in the hours after Vladimir Putin announced his plans for a military operation in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden made public remarks and answered questions from reporters about the US response. The Wall Street Journal once again raised...

of International Criminal Justice. Is international law having a Hallmark Minute? If, as the jurisprudes keep reminding us, candor is dandy, can we now reply that affection is also effective, that fondness has its own forensic force? The sentiments suffusing these books are not those of the greeting card and the holiday romance; instead, they speak to the affective dynamics that obtain among parties, judges, lawyers, and law professors, in contexts that explore “the relationships between feelings and judgments” or offer “hybridised accounts of cognition and feeling” (41). For Simpson,...

A Comment on Shiri Krebs’ chapter “The Invisible Frames Affecting Wartime Investigation: Legal Epistemology, Metaphors, and Cognitive Biases” [Emiliano J. Buis is a Professor of Public International Law at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and at the Central University of the Province of Buenos Aires (UNICEN), and researcher at the National Research Council for Science and Technology (CONICET)] Introduction Shiri Krebs’ insightful contribution to the book International Law’s Invisible Frames. Social Cognition and Knowledge Production in International Legal Processes, edited by Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch, is a thought-provoking...

...No doubt there are “strange nationalities.” In some cases, individuals have exploited an anomalous basis for citizenship in countries to which they have little or no affective (or effective) attachment – often on the basis of a parent or grandparent’s nationality. In others, countries have in effect bought competitors, with a grant of citizenship as a necessary part of the bargain. I don’t see this is as a problem, except to the extent that it depends on luck of the draw (either you have that grandparent or you don’t). But...

...a call for papers for its upcoming panel on “Emotional Warfare and its Limits: Towards an Affective Turn in International Humanitarian Law”, organized in the context of the International Conference on “Historicising International (Humanitarian) Law? Could we? Should we?” on 6–8 October 2016. When and why did the law of armed conflict become “humanitarian”? What role do fear, envy, or friendship play in the regulation of war? Can law offer an effective way out of the irrationality of violence? Possible answers to these questions cannot be addressed by means of...

...as citizens, often highlighting their capacity as citizens to vote. The reports are obviously significant beyond what they predictably report. In her elegant book Democracy and the Foreigner (which ties together sources as disparate as The Wizard of Oz and Shane to the Book of Ruth and Rousseau), political scientist Bonnie Honig describes how naturalization rites actualize our conception of the American nation. “With a hope and a prayer and an oath,” the ceremonies “testify to the fundamental consentworthiness of the regime by symbolically representing the consent that is effectively...