Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

brilliant and eloquent weaving of Berman’s various scholarly threads. While the book concludes in part that law is “messy,” the book’s argument is quite neat, tight, and logical. Berman addresses and redresses the dominant critiques lobbed at his work over the years, showcases agility with interdisciplinary research, and demonstrates the value of legal scholarship that does not end with heavy-handed prescriptions. Like all books of this breadth, there is room for critique. Instead, in this post, I offer some broader thoughts on ways to push Berman’s outstanding work beyond its...

...the ECtHR, to what Julia Dehm refers to as the ‘temporal unfitness’ of environmental human rights to ‘deliver temporal justice in the face of temporally transgressive environmental harms’ (p. 45), and the ‘temporal myopia’ of jus cogens norms (Mary H Hansel, ch. 10), to take some examples discussed in the book. At the same time, key international human rights bodies rarely confront temporality in explicit terms. How do you hope the book’s foregrounding of temporality might influence such actors? KM: The book views human rights bodies and actors as regularly...

of trust.  Parting Words Superbly researched and beautifully crafted, Drumbl and Holá’s book is a major event in the critical transitional justice scholarship. It must be widely read and will be unmissable for every transitional justice scholar and policy-maker. The book brushes against the grain of comfortable, reductive narratives which hold sway in most transitional societies, retelling secret service collaborators as a few ‘rotten apples’ to be excised from the healthy body of an otherwise innocent nation (the ‘evil traitors’ versus ‘heroic resisters’ binary). Drumbl and Holá deliver a nuanced...

...gaps and contradictions in the official explanations that David Ray Griffin (and other devoted scholars of high integrity) have been documenting in book after book ever since his authoritative The New Pearl Harbor in 2004 (updated in 2008).” In writing the above, Mr. Falk clearly asserted the existence of 9/11 “conspiracies,” and he unequivocally endorsed the notorious 9/11 conspiracy tract, The New Pearl Harbor as an “authoritative” book, and its author, David Ray Griffin, as a “devoted scholar of high integrity.” The main thesis of this book is that the...

have been about challenging injustices on a number of fronts, and historically so, to counteract the still persistent idea that they are comparatively passive or anti-legal. I look forward to the publication of Professor Pils book on human rights lawyers in China [Eva Pils, CHINA’S HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYERS: ADVOCACY AND RESISTANCE (forthcoming, 2014)], and also heartily recommend Rachel Stern’s recent book on Chinese environmental activism. [Rachel Stern, ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM IN CHINA: A STUDY OF POLITICAL AMBIVALENCE (2013).] Further, Professor Pil’s citation of recent crack-downs on any form of Chinese activism...

I thank Professor Brown for his further application of the justificatory theory to the ICJ’s advisory opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, another incident not covered in my book. I am glad he finds the justificatory theory useful in explaining the Court’s decision. As Professor Ku mentioned earlier this week, one test of the value of a theory is how well it explains the subject matter of the theory. Professor Brown also rightly points out that the Court caused some difficulties in the Nuclear...

I want to join the rest of Opinio Juris in welcoming Tom; I have read Confronting Global Terrorsm and American Neo-Conservatism with great interest and am looking forward to commenting on it. As befits someone who, on some definitions anyway, probably counts as a neo-con, I have some disagreements with the book – starting, unsurprisingly, with the definition of neoconservative and what it means (or meant). Before getting there, however, I want to start by praising what I think is a great strength of Tom’s book – and that is...

...of double standards and the different treatment of seemingly like situations. Nor is it the case that all those others who do this are doing so to justify Russia’s actions. Some are asking ‘what about’, not to justify Russia’s actions, but actually, the reverse – to say, in the context of an assumption that what Russia is doing is wrong, to ask why, when violations of international law of the same or a similar nature happen elsewhere, there is not the same response- a response they would welcome – by...

...force. For the sake of analysis, let’s assume that the Global Hawk did indeed enter Iranian airspace. That would, undoubtedly, constitute a violation of Iranian sovereignty. It could also amount to an unlawful use of force. However, as Michael Schmitt explained on Just Security, states are not permitted to use force in response to any breach of sovereignty, nor are states allowed to use force in response to every unlawful use of force. In the absence of U.N. Security Council authorization and except in cases of intervention by invitation, states...

First, sincere thanks to the OpinioJuris team for inviting me to share my thoughts on Ben Wittes exceptional book; and thanks to Ben for such a well researched, well written, and provocative work. My initial reaction to the book was that Ben has hit the proverbial nail on the head in terms of defining the policy challenge surrounding how the United States should or must frame the response to the threat of transnational terrorism. More specifically, Ben clearly exposes how efforts to squeeze the response to this threat into existing...

of liberal construction does not mean that the court can ignore a clear failure in the pleading to allege facts which set forth a claim currently cognizable in a federal district court. The International Court of Justice “is a[j]udicial arm of the United Nations.” The International Court of Justice does not have jurisdiction over criminal cases and collateral attacks on convictions.. The jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice is limited to disputes between nations. It should also be noted that the above-captioned case is barred by the Foreign Sovereign...

...they are committed — applies to his acts and thus justifies punishing him (“justice can be helped to triumph by the proper application of this penal law”). That does not make the authors of the amicus brief Nazis. But it does mean that the amicus brief is relying on the same kind of analogical reasoning that was at the heart of the Nazis’ perversion of the German criminal-justice system — the same kind of analogical reasoning that was specifically condemned as itself criminal by American judges in the Justice case....