Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

to hear whether van Dijk’s archival research sheds any further light on this question.  More Work to Be Done? Like all the best books, van Dijk’s book raises a number of questions in the mind of the reader and identifies avenues for further research and analysis. While the book focuses on the UK, French, US, Soviet Union and ICRC delegations, its methodology raises curiosity about what was going on in the other delegations’ back rooms. His work also shows that many other States played key roles in the drafting of...

[Andrew Guzman is Professor of Law and Director of the Advanced Law Degree Programs at Berkeley Law School, University of California, Berkeley.] This is a superb book. I say this without the slightest bit of surprise, as that is what one would expect from these authors. In addition to the quality of the content, the book is all the more important because there is no comparable tour of international law from a law and economics perspective. I have disagreements with some of the content of the book – it would...

...of Opinio Juris’ very pertinent symposium about the role of international law in responding to the crisis. One sub-question that may not come immediately to our minds is the relevance, if any, of international criminal law (ICL) and international criminal justice vis-à-vis pandemics like the COVID-19 one. Are notions of individual accountability and of criminal conduct relevant in this particular context?  Is there a role for international criminal justice in the prevention of, and response to public health emergencies of this kind? Many will advance a negative answer to these...

[Jean Galbraith is Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Camden School of Law] This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-3 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I want to thank Opinio Juris and the Leiden Journal of International Law for putting together this symposium. I am especially grateful to Professor Dov Jacobs for organizing this session and to Professors Mark Drumbl and Meg deGuzman for their thoughtful comments about my article. Some years back, I noticed how frequently international...

Professor Ku’s review of When International Law Works is most insightful. I thank him for it. His “short bloggish description” of its thesis is as clear a summary of my book as I’ve been able to muster in two sentences. I confess I will probably appropriate it when I present the book at Temple Law School later this week. Professor Ku raises a good question about how predictive my “theory” is. Certainly theory in the hard sciences is often predictive. Many such theories are expressed as falsifiable hypotheses. In contrast,...

...to Influence States: Socialization and International Human Rights Law” has lead many international lawyers to focus not only on only political science and economics, but also on sociology. It inspired me to write this book. Their comments invite debate on several empirical issues, as well as on two major theoretical questions: 1) Do diffusion studies imply that “international law is weaker than generally recognized”? 2) How does my theory of diffusion through democracy connect to theories of state socialization, and more generally to research on constructivism and sociological institutionalism? Which...

same words that conclude my book: The justification for international law does not depend on whether it is law. It depends on whether the international legal system is effective and good. . . . On final analysis, international law is what we make of it, for it is nothing more or less than the sum of our decisions. If my book provides a framework to clarify our disagreements and find solutions, as we have begun to do in this Roundtable, then I have achieved what I set out to do....

[William W. Burke-White is Deputy Dean and Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania Law School.] This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 54(1) symposium. Other posts from this series can be found in the related posts below. Natalie Lockwood’s article, “International Vote Buying,” recently published in the Harvard International Law Journal, makes an important contribution to a set of understudied questions around the legality and appropriateness of international vote-buying. Lockwood quickly admits that international law itself says little about the legality of such vote buying...

[Eyal Benvenisti is the Anny and Paul Yanowicz Professor of Human Rights at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and Global Visiting Professor at New York University School of Law.] I am grateful for the three incisive and insightful comments. Due to space limitations I will not be able to do justice to any of the comments in this response, but they will certainly help in my future work on this subject. I will use this brief response to clarify some parts of my argument and to situate the article...

[William Partlett is an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution.] This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 53(2) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. The Democratic Coup d’Etat is an important article. First, and most obviously, this Article carries significant policy implications. The political transformations sweeping the Middle East and North Africa – known as the “Arab Spring” – have presented a wide range of conceptual challenges to policymakers and political...

Austen Parrish is a Professor of Law and the Vice Dean at Southwestern Law School. I’m grateful to Opinio Juris for inviting me to comment on Marko Milanovic’s book on the Extraterritorial Application of Human Rights Treaties. The book makes a meaningful contribution to an increasingly important issue of treaty interpretation, and the book’s sweeping treatment of how different courts and entities have addressed whether treaty-based human rights obligations apply beyond borders deserves praise. Few authors have provided this sort of detailed doctrinal description, and none to this degree of...

...points of view might be quoted. Speaking in front of the Peel Commission in 1937, Winston Churchill made it clear for instance that there was nothing in the definition of the “National Home” that might have precluded “the establishment of a Jewish State.” (Palestine Royal Commission: Command Paper 5479 of 1937.) As noted by Isaiah Friedman in his British Pan-Arab Policy, 1915-1922: “Whether [the first British High Commissioner for Palestine Herbert] Samuel had this ultimate aim in mind when conceiving his policy is dubious. But Churchill, as his response of...