Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

the moment comes, I would like to be at peace with myself. [Lauri R. Tanner]: Does “being at peace” with yourself relate to your life from here forward, like possibly becoming a judge at the World Court in The Hague? [Judge Trindade]: Yes, absolutely, it’s about the cause of justice, and the realization of justice.” This is the legacy that Judge Trindade leaves behind: a career and a life dedicated to the realization of justice through a humanized international law. It is one that will live on long after him....

[Dr. Matthew Saul is a Research Fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights and Lecturer at Durham University, UK (on leave)] This is the third response in our Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation. Earlier posts can be found in the Related Links at the end of this post. Thank you to all of my fellow symposium participants for a very interesting set of posts. This symposium has clearly raised a number of very important issues. One point that I find particularly interesting is the...

...was largely rhetorical, The Paquete Habana being the leading exception where the Court really did look to state practice to determine the content of customary international law. Second, there is a great deal of attention to “why” questions in the book. Individual authors address a number of the questions that Anderson raises and others too. What the book does not attempt to do is to view the history of international law in the Supreme Court through a single lens. Had the editors tried to impose a single viewpoint on our...

...in the pursuit of global justice, something that surely keeps the dreamers of international criminal justice up at night. It really wasn’t supposed to go this way. The ICC was meant to be a shining star in the liberal cosmopolitan trajectory which instructed the peoples of the world that no one could hide behind state sovereignty anymore. What mattered in global politics and ethics wasn’t still supposed to be states over all else. Slowly, but surely, the post-WWII global conscience was intended to wither away the rigidity of statehood as...

...OTP’s findings should be revisited. This contribution argues the OTP should pay a qualified deference to decisions of Israel’s Supreme Court sitting as the High Court of Justice (“HCJ”) when conducting complementarity analysis with respect to a potential settlements case. We argue that this position is consistent with a textual interpretation of the Rome Statute, the Court’s jurisprudence to date, and sound policy reasons too. Complementarity and the Rome system of justice The Rome Statute contemplates a system of justice which is essentially based on two pillars. The first is...

Justice del Castillo had committed plagiarism and misuse of plagiarized works, holding that Justice del Castillo’s clerk/court researcher accidentally deleted the attributions, which could not have been detected since “the Microsoft word program does not have a function that raises an alarm when original materials are cut up or pruned.” The full text of the decision can be found here: http://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/jurisprudence/2010/october2010/10-7-17-SC.htm 7. The newest member of the Court, Justice Lourdes Aranal-Sereno, strongly dissented along with (Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales) from the Court’s findings and showed why plagiarism and misrepresentation was committed...

five women are members of the European Court of Justice, two as judges and three as advocates-general. Women account for eight out of eighteen judges on the International Criminal Court; one of them serves as that court’s first vice-president. I think it is interesting to consider Justice Ginsburg’s point about the comparative success of women in the judiciary across jurisdictions. She certainly is correct that the United States is not leading the way on this issue. Of course, until Justice O’Connor’s retirement we had two of nine justices who were...

The blog Making Sense of Darfur has been hosting a symposium on Adam M. Smith’s book After Genocide: Bringing the Devil to Justice, in which the author argues — oversimplifying only slightly — that international criminal trials are always inferior to domestic trials and non-punitive accountability mechanisms. I have neither the time nor the inclination to address the book’s claims at length; interested readers should take a look at the critiques offered by Sarah Nouwen, Sadia al Imam, and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. I just want to highlight a claim that the...

demise, coincident with Rwandan criminal justice system reform initiatives, is motivated in part by the government’s efforts to make extradition to Kigali look like a more attractive option to Europeans harboring genocide suspects — not that gacaca is used for such suspects but general justice system appearances can be important). I noted, and academic literature has amply explored, the Frankenstein monster assemblage of a local, non-systematized, oral-tradition civil dispute mechanism (traditional gacaca) with a codified, state-centric criminal justice bureaucracy (what the Rwandan government has been operating). Clearly, traditional gacaca was...

a larger role for the ICTR together with something along the lines of Truth Commissions, would have better served the myriad ends of justice (transitional, reconciliatory, retributive, etc.) in Rwanda, all things being equal.... * Please see his contribution to Heather Strang and John Braithwaite, eds., Restorative Justice and Civil Society (2001): pp. 35-55. **Alison Des Forges and Timothy Longman, "Legal Responses to Genocide in Rwanda,' in Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein, eds., My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermatn of Mass Atrocity (2004): pp. 49-68...

As Mark writes, “[i]nternational criminal justice largely is operationalized through criminal tribunals. Courtrooms have gained ascendancy through adversarial third-party adjudication, conducted in judicialized settings, and premised on a construction of the individual as the central unit of action.” Mark rejects this “liberal-legal” model of international criminal law; in his view –- and this is the central thesis of his book –- “the preference for criminalization has prompted a shortfall with regard to the consideration and deployment of other legal, regulatory, and transformative mechanisms in the quest for justice,” such as...

Like many lawyers who study constitutional law, I was saddened when I heard last night of the unexpected death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The internet being what it is, commentators have already offered their quick takes on Scalia’s substantial and multifaceted jurisprudential legacy (indeed, I think we’ve already moved on to debating his replacement). Most of these analyses have been fair, but I have been a little irritated with the glib and mostly inaccurate descriptions of Justice Scalia’s attitude toward international law. For instance, Rosa Brooks writes...