Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

This week Opinio Juris is hosting a discussion on Laura Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Professor Dickinson is the Oswald Symister Colclough Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School in Washington DC. Her book addresses issues related to the increasing privatization of foreign policy functions of government. Here is the abstract: Over the past decade, states and international organizations have shifted a surprising range of foreign policy functions to private contractors. But who is accountable...

[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...

[Eric Posner is Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar at the University of Chicago] I’m going to focus on a narrow issue, one that Katerina takes up in the last chapter of her impressive book, and that is the relationship between policy diffusion (the topic of her book) and international law (which is something of an afterthought), and specifically the debate as to why states comply with international law. I can see a few possibilities. First, there is no relationship between the argument in her...

...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...

[Jake Colvin is Vice President of Global Trade Issues at the National Foreign Trade Council.] How is global trade different in the digital age? As Anupam Chander makes clear in his new book The Electronic Silk Road, the internet is changing who trades, what is traded, and how we trade, all of which have implications and complications for businesses, consumers and policymakers. Upfront, his book outlines the great promise of the internet to democratize global trade. Businesses and entrepreneurs around the world can hang a digital shingle to offer goods...

[Anupam Chander is Professor of Law at The University of California, Davis] I am honored to have such a brilliant and prominent set of interlocutors from across the world discussing my book, The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce. I am grateful for the sharp insights each of my commentators brings, and humbled by the praise they offer. Each of the commentators has selected a different aspect of the book to focus on in his or her remarks, and so I will respond to...

...than replaces traditional publications. Is the next great wave of legal scholarship going to be self-published books? I would not be surprised. Bob Mayer’s post today about self-publishing his latest book of historical fiction, Duty, Honor, Country, only reinforces that impression. Much of what he says could apply with equal force to books of non-fiction, including legal scholarship. Here’s a few choice excerpts: I appreciate the opportunity to blog here today, as it’s a very special occasion, not only being the 150th Anniversary of the start of the Civil War,...

Opinio Juris and EJIL: Talk! are happy to announce that we will be hosting two joint book discussions. The first book is OJ’s own Kevin Heller’s The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford UP). That discussion starts today. We have a fantastic lineup of discussants, to whom we are most grateful for their time and insight. On EJIL: Talk! it’ll be Michael Marrus (Toronto), Alexa Stiller (Bern), and Rob Cryer (Birmingham), and on Opinio Juris, David Glazier (Loyola, LA), Detlev Vagts (Harvard), Roger Clark (Rutgers-Camden),...

We are very pleased to introduce Walter Russell Mead to Opinio Juris readers to discuss his most recent book, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the country’s leading students of American foreign policy. His book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), was widely hailed by reviewers, historians, and diplomats as an important...

...sparking concerns in Israel about the possibility of an imminent attack. This situation further coincided with the killing of Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander (also supported by Iran), in an Israeli airstrike on a suburb of Beirut, the Lebanese capital. Time has since passed without any major response to those initial threats by the international community leaving Israel and the broader Middle East in a state of on-going hostility and tension. While the nature and severity of Iran’s overall response remains unclear, Iran has issued a prime facie threat...

...support characterizing this as a military operation conducted under the laws of armed conflict and not a law enforcement operation. This is not necessarily wrong, but it is at least misleading. Although how a state chooses to respond to a threat from a non-state actor is relevant to whether hostilities rise to the level of armed conflict, the form of the response — military or law-enforcement — does not determine whether an armed conflict exists. It is simply one factor, the importance of which is debatable. States do not get...

[This post is part of the Second Harvard International Law Journal/Opinio Juris Symposium.] In 2007, I authored two papers — one for a military audience and another for a legal one — arguing that debates over the law’s response to the growing range of cyberthreats would likely track ongoing debates over law’s response to terrorism. In that context, we’ve seen 4 options emerge: First, those who say terrorism is a crime, and only a crime, with any legal response limited to law enforcement mechanisms. Second, those who insist terrorism is...