Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...likely to precipitate military conflict. I summarized the JCPOA in a blog post here at Opinio Juris at the time of its adoption. My newly published book, Iran’s Nuclear Program and International Law: From Confrontation to Accord, provides an in-depth examination of the legal and diplomatic history that form the context for the JCPOA’s agreement, and sets out to describe and to answer the most important legal questions that were in dispute among the JCPOA’s parties. The aim of the book is to clarify how the relevant sources of international...

thinking. Having read with fascination the previous Opinio Juris book discussions, I have to anticipate that by the end of this week my interlocutors will have squeezed out of me every lingering ounce of intellectual complacency. Chris suggested that I open the exchange by sketching in a few broad strokes what I thought I was doing in this book. My purpose, however well or poorly realized, was to look through a Liberal optic at the most important and neuralgic issues implicated in the struggle against mass-casualty terrorism linked to individuals...

This week we are pleased to host the first discussion in the Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris Book Club. Tom Farer, the Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, will join us to discuss his new book, Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy. In addition, Kristen Boon from Seton Hall Law School will be joining us for the conversation as well. Today, Tom will introduce his book in general and we will discuss issues relating to...

...Harold Koh, the State Department Legal Advisor, argues drones are lawful, but in his former life as an academic, Professor Koh, the human rights scholar, might have taken a different view. The book also explains why bank regulators follow BASEL III even if it is not strictly law. Crucially, the book is an attempt not just to explain international law, but to guide decisionmakers about what to do about it. I will leave the details of my thesis to later posts. For now, I offer thanks to Opinio Juris and...

“Internationalized Armed Conflicts in International Law” by Kubo Mačák presents a detailed and insightful analysis of the tipping point at which non-international armed conflict (NIAC) may be ‘internationalized’ and considered to be an international armed conflict (IAC), with the focus in particular in relation to the status of combatants and the law of occupation. Far from esoteric, the topic is timely, relevant and has a real impact on the rights and obligations in the conduct of warfare. A few observations as I perused the book – some general in nature,...

in developing countries’ struggle to preserve the flexibilities of the TRIPS agreement. In this post, I engage with Andreas Buser’s book by looking at what has followed the “rise of emerging powers”. The story recounted in the book has now moved to its next chapters. I make the following claims: (i) it is by now clear that the most consequential development for global economic governance has not been  the “rise of emerging economies”, but the rise of China; and (ii) the terms in which the debate on the “rise of...

I want to take a moment to spruik (if you don’t know the word, look it up!) Jeffrey Kahn‘s new book, Mrs. Shipley’s Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists, which has just been published by the University of Michigan Press. Here is the publisher’s description: Today, when a single person can turn an airplane into a guided missile, no one objects to rigorous security before flying. But can the state simply declare some people too dangerous to travel, ever and anywhere? Does the Constitution protect a fundamental right...

...so rather than dwell on this point, I want to briefly segue to a larger question that has plagued me from the beginning of this debate: are we to judge proposals like those in Ben’s book in a vacuum? Or, in contrast, should we see these proposals through the lens of the many egregious missteps the Bush Administration has taken in its conduct of the fight against terrorism over the past seven years? I ask this question because right after finishing Ben’s book, I read Jane Mayer’s new book, which...

I rarely get excited about a new book before I’ve read it — but I’m excited about this one, Mark Lewis’s The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950. Here is OUP’s description: The Birth of the New Justice is a history of the attempts to instate ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international criminal laws from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Cold War. The purpose of these courts was to repress aggressive war, war crimes,...

...work, de Pando’s posthumous book did not go unnoticed. In an extremely graceful move, Bello himself wrote a very forgiving review (see page 537), saying it is basically a “new edition” of his own book, but one that incorporated “interesting interpolations and instructive notes”. Speaking in the third person, referring to himself as “the author of the Principles”, Bello treats de Pando’s plagiarism as a showing of respect: “It is true that [de Pando] does the author of the Principles [meaning Bello] the honour of frequent citation, and sometimes in...

The United States Naval War College’s International Law Department has digitally published Volume 88 of its International Law Studies Blue Book series, entitled “Non-International Armed Conflict in the Twenty-First Century” and it may be downloaded for free from the Blue Book link on the Naval War College International Law Department’s Stockton Research Portal. Additionally, a direct link to the .pdf file of Volume 88 is here. Once printing is complete in the fall, the bound volume will be available for purchase through the Government Printing Office Bookstore. Subscribers to Lexis...

will introduce the book later today, followed by a general comment by Professor Laurence Boisson de Chazournes (Geneva). From tomorrow until the end of the week, the discussion will focus on specific chapters dealing with the intersection between investment law and international armed conflict, human rights, trade, sustainable development and much more! Cambridge University Press is offering our readers who wish to purchase the book a 20% discount until the end of October. To claim your discount, click here and enter the code “BaetensOJ2013”. We look forward to what promises...