Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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...

Thanks to my fellow co-bloggers here at Opinio Juris for the chance to discuss my book Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization. It’s been an honor (and a lot of fun) to be a part of this project with all of them in this ever-changing young medium. Thanks also to Julian for introducing the discussion on Thursday. I’ll look forward to comments on the book from our guest bloggers and readers over the next couple of days. I thought I’d lead off with three developments each of which poses a...

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...

to be faced. The problem is not the traditional one of agent-principal asymmetry of information, but rather symmetry of uncertainty: neither the private security contractor nor the government actor truly knows what kinds of situations will arise or the best response. Since this often describes armed conflict, post conflict, or insecure situations in which private security contractors often operate, the ordinary response in the law to such symmetric uncertainty is not to rely on contract at all – or, at most, to use the form of a contract to memorialize...

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,...

[Professor Eyal Benvenisti is the Whewell Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge, CC Ng Fellow in Law at Jesus College, and the Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. In Fall 2022 he will be the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.] Boyd van Dijk’s “Preparing for War” offers a rich historical account of the drafting process of the 1949 Geneva Conventions which goes beyond the usual triumphalist rhetoric and uncovers the behind the scenes strategies, struggles and coincidences. The book significantly...

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...

[Larry Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law] Katerina Linos has written an audacious and analytically rigorous study of how health and family policies spread over time across industrialized countries. She deftly synthesizes a broad range of qualitative and quantitative research methods into a brilliantly-conceived research design that analyzes the mechanisms by which such policies disperse across borders. The book’s core findings—that foreign and international models influence domestic policy adoption via politicians’ appeals to skeptical voters who view...

This is the third day in our discussion of Professor Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Links to the related posts can be found below. On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris, I’d like to thank Laura (and our guest bloggers) for joining us this week to do a discussion about her timely new book, Outsourcing War & Peace. As someone who teaches National Security Law and Contracts, I was particularly struck by an observation she made early...

[Laura Dickinson is the Oswald Symister Colclough Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School in Washington DC.] This is the third day in our discussion of Professor Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Links to the related posts can be found below. While they are not often viewed in this way, government contracts can serve as a tool for implementing public values such as human rights or humanitarian law principles. In the domestic setting, with privatized...

This is the second day in our discussion of Professor Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Links to the related posts can be found below. One of the many things I like about Professor Dickinson’s book is the broad approach it takes to thinking about accountability. When I ask my law students to engage in problem-solving hypotheticals – i.e. Here’s a problem in the world, you are X individual/organization/state worried about the problem, what should we do about it? –...

[Jeffrey K. Walker is Assistant Dean for Transnational Programs at St. John’s University School of Law] This is the third day in our discussion of Professor Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Links to the related posts can be found below. With Outsourcing War and Peace, Laura Dickinson did a remarkable job canvassing an area of the law that has received a significant amount of attention and scholarship since the publication of Peter Singer’s landmark 2003 book, Corporate Warriors. Laura...