Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
22 Oct Book Symposium The Electronic Silk Road: Connecting dots in a world of bits
...and their repressing practices. From a bird’s eye view and thinking about the overall contribution of the book, it does make an absolutely important argument about the changing nature of trade in the digital networked environment – a reality that has not been sufficiently recognized even by those who create and manage the rules of global trade, at home and on the international scene. In an intellectually interesting and compelling manner, the book situates contemporary practices of online trade into a broader contextual framework and puts forward possible avenues to...26 Oct Book Roundtable: Ruti Teitel’s Humanity’s Law
I’m delighted to have been asked to participate in this discussion of Ruti Teitel’s Humanity’s Law. Let me start by simply saying what a great read this book is. Congratulations to Ruti on a book that really does shift our thinking about the base lines of international law, challenge conventional notions of a state-centric international legal system, and help make sense of the changes across a range of sub-fields in international law that all do more to privilege the individual. Ruti’s central claim is that there has been a move...25 Jul International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court, edited by Bill Dodge, Mike Ramsey and David Sloss. Mike has already described the book’s purpose and organizational structure in a post from this morning. My post focuses on some of the book’s overall strengths and perhaps weaknesses. Edited volumes are hard to do well, and are often little more than a hit or miss set of loosely connected essays. This book, by contrast, is extremely well-edited and the individual contributions are very carefully linked...21 Oct Book Symposium: Comments on Anupam Chander’s The Electronic Silk Road
[Michael Birnhack is a Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University] Anupam Chander’s new book, The Electronic Silk Road is an admirable scholarly achievement. Chander draws our—the global community of cyberspace users—attention to the increasing globalization of information-based services. He discusses the pros and cons of what he calls cybertrade or Trade 2.0, or more specifically, net-work, with much clarity, drawing on a wide array of examples, ranging from North to South. The book provides a rich description and timely observations, as well as a sound and coherent set of...21 May Book Discussion “Outsourcing War and Peace”: Outsourcing and Organizational Culture
commander can seek “top cover” by talking to the lawyer assigned to that commander’s commander), and they can recommend that a commander invoke the military justice system in cases of abuse. As I note in the book: Military lawyers, embedded with troops in combat and consulting regularly with commanders, have internalized and seek to operationalize the core values inscribed in the international law of armed conflict, in particular the imposition of limits on the use of force. To be sure, the lawyers are not always successful, and it would be...07 Feb Opinio Juris Book Discussion: Andrew Guzman, “How International Law Works”
The fun continues at Opinio Juris next week, February 11-14, as we host an online discussion of Professor Andrew Guzman’s book, How International Law Works, which has just been published by Oxford University Press. Professor Guzman teaches at UC-Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, where he directs the International Legal Studies Program. Guzman is a prolific scholar and this book makes an important contribution to international law theory by deploying the tools of rational choice to explain how and why international law affects the behavior of states. Professor Guzman will...21 Mar Book Review, Oxford Companion to International Criminal Justice
My book review of the Oxford Companion, edited by Antonio Cassese and many others, has just been published in the new issue of the American Journal of International Law. It’s a decent-sized review, almost 5,000 words, as befits a book that checks in at more than 1200 pages. I argue that the book is a magisterial achievement, one of the most important ever published on international criminal law, but suffers from two important flaws: it reflects an extremely prosecution-centric view of ICL, and it significantly overstates ICL’s coherence. (My favorite...
30 Nov Book Symposium: Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes
This week, we have the pleasure of hosting an exciting discussion on Jennifer Trahan’s award-winning book, Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes, published by Cambridge University Press. From the Publisher: In this book, the author outlines three independent bases for the existence of legal limits to the veto by UN Security Council permanent members while atrocity crimes are occurring. The provisions of the UN Charter creating the veto cannot override the UN’s ‘Purposes and Principles’, nor jus cogens (peremptory norms of international...06 Sep Neocons, Israel, Latin America, and Other Final Thoughts and Questions
I want to thank Tom for participating in this discussion; I have re-read the book as we have had this discussion, and it has provided great illumination on what the text is about. I have learned a great deal from the discussion and from the book. I apologize for coming late with this entry; it was hard to get to this until the weekend, and I wanted to be certain I had fully re-read the book – Tom, just when you thought the discussion was over … a late and...18 Oct Book Symposium Informal International Lawmaking: A comment by Chris Brummer
...a point the book explores in considerable depth. But many of these deficits arise not only in informal organizations, but also in treaty-based forums like the European Union. Moreover, as I have observed in my own work, where we do see obvious democratic deficits, informal organizations are much more likely and capable of undertaking change than their hard law counterparts—from the G-20s usurpation of the G-7’s leadership role, to the formal inclusion of regional consultative bodies in the FSB’s new and revised 2012 Charter. Thus one of the book’s lessons,...