Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...“interests of justice” does not encompass the interests of peace (Policy Paper on the Interests of Justice, 2007), the term may be interpreted as including the idea that in conflict situations, the Prosecutor arbitrates between the imperative of justice and the imperative of peace (T. de Souza Diaz and D. Akande, Peace Negotiations as “Interests of Justice”, 2020) A more holistic understanding of justice could therefore support an approach in which considerations relating to peace are also taken into account. Article 16 of the Rome Statute constitutes a further mechanism...

[Beth Van Schaack is the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School and Faculty Affiliate at the Handa Center for Human Rights & International Justice at Stanford University. Prior to returning to academia, she served as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice of the U.S. Department of State.] Until very recently, the Trump Administration had been largely silent on international criminal justice issues and the imperative of accountability for grave international crimes. As such, and given how...

Executive’s superior political accountability and expertise. Indeed, at first glance, it seems difficult to reconcile the Justice Stevens of Chevron – embracing judicial deference to the Executive – and the Justice Stevens of Hamdan – rejecting any notion of even modest deference to the Executive in interpreting the statutory Authorization for Use of Military Force and Uniform Code of Military Justice. One might argue the decisions are better read simply as a sign of the evolution of Justice Stevens’ own views during his long tenure on the bench. This view...

...promise of justice to victims. Promises of justice that come from within the online community (rather than the legal community) can give victims and relatives hope and a sense of visibility through increased and sustained engagement with a case and the use of ‘justice’ language. While giving people hope can sometimes be positive, it can do more harm than good when those hopes are later let down. This can often be the case when the information gathered by citizen sleuths or discussed in a documentary cannot actually meet legal evidentiary...

these processes together, as I do in Chapter 3 and more generally in the book, is crucial to understanding the role of law in this occupation, and indeed in occupations in general. I am grateful to Opinio Juris for devoting a symposium to the book. Its 2012 symposium dealing with the functional approach, which opened with a post where I outlined it, was an important milestone on the way to the book and it is exciting that, in a way, we have now come full circle. I am thankful to...

The choice of book reviewer might be surprising but the result, unfortunately, is not. Yoo reviews two books: David Scheffer’s memoir All the Missing Souls and William Shawcross’ Justice and the Enemy. Scheffer’s book details his time working on war crimes issues, ultimately as the Ambassador at Large on War Crimes, in President Clinton’s State Department. (Disclosure: we hope to have Scheffer guest blog with us sometimes in the next couple of months about his book.) Shawcross’s book, as Yoo describes it, “asks whether diplomats and specialists in international affairs,...

Court of Justice and Human Rights with criminal jurisdiction and immunities for heads of state and senior officials. In the end, there is a distinct possibility that the Central African court will join the ranks of most other African hybrid ventures, which remain in the realm of promising but unfulfilled ideas. If this happens, it might well be time to ask whether hybrid justice on the continent resembles something of an African mirage… as one approaches and strains for a closer look, the prospect of justice recedes on the horizon....

...manner, we can open our analysis to all kinds of relationships between possible rights-holders and possible duty-bearers in a variety of settings, and make novel propositions which – if grounded convincingly – could help progressively develop international human rights law. This blog symposium was convened with the goal to do precisely that: to contribute to the debate on extraterritoriality in human rights law by zooming in on the theoretical and conceptual foundations for the existence of human rights relationships (in the extraterritorial context). The added value of this symposium is...

are we to teach? How? Do we need a textbook? If so, what for? What is the role of the teacher? These are some of the self-reflexive questions that any good teacher should periodically ask herself. Stolk’s insightful observations nicely complement Bernardino’s epistemological points and witty remarks. To look at textbooks as ‘engines of socio-mental control’ and to expose the micropolitics of textbook writing is a much-needed revelation of an invisible frame which is conspicuously before our eyes and yet few can see. No textbook can be neutral and offer...

the profession in the textbook itself. Being a textbook author is akin to the anti-thesis of being subversive, young, and cool. Which, of course, underscores Bernardino’s point: the boringness of the textbook should not fool us into thinking that it is uncontestable, on the contrary. But this leaves us with questions such as: Are the hegemonic characteristics of a textbook inherent to the format? And would that mean that, as soon as a textbook becomes subversive and original, it would no longer function as a textbook?  Alexandra: Seems like it...

[Molly Land is Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law] I’m delighted to be able to take part in this online symposium dedicated to Anupam Chander’s new book, The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce. Chander’s book masterfully brings together a set of debates about technology, privacy, and human rights to consider the pitfalls and promise of regulating Internet trade. In an accessible and engaging way, Chander reorients our thinking about the Internet by locating it firmly in the trajectory...

[Pierre-Hugues Verdier is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law] Katerina Linos’s new book, The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion, is one of the most important contributions to arise from the recent turn to empirical scholarship in international law and international relations. Instead of following a deductive path from broad theoretical assumptions, the book carefully combines survey evidence, cross-country regression analysis and case studies to paint a coherent picture of policy diffusion through democracy in the fields of health and family policy. Yet, this...