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...

...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...

on both U.S. foreign policy and the world, but the underlying global superstructure remains mostly in place. The Trump Administration is malevolence tempered not so much by incompetence (although there is that too) as by the centrality of the international legal order to U.S. foreign policy and by a many-pronged resistance that is defending this order. For purposes of this review, I want to focus on three aspects of the book. One is Professor Koh’s discussion of the Trump Administration’s actions to date and the responses to these actions. This...

Sorry to contribute to this phenomenon, but John Yoo’s new book War By Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror is now out from Atlantic Monthly Press (not affiliated with the Atlantic Monthly, I was surprised to discover, though it’s something of an explanation), and shouldn’t go ignored. As signaled by the subtitle, this is not a book directed at an academic audience, and I’m not going to do the equivalent of a review here (I’ve collected some highlights after the jump). A couple of brief observations:...

more light than heat and so we have put together a group of thoughtful commentators to guest with us for this symposium. Joining us for this discussion are Paul Cliteur, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Leiden and the author of the recent book The Secular Outlook: In Defense of Moral and Political Secularism (Wiley 2010), as well as Peggy’s and my colleague Mark Movsesian, the Frederick A. Whitney Professor of Contract Law st St. Johns Law School and the founding director of the Law School’s Center for...

[Ramses Wessel is Professor of the Law of the European Union and other International Organizations at the University of Twente] First of all many thanks to Prof. Tai-Heng Cheng for taking the time to respond so eloquently to the parts on legality and normativity in our book on Informal International Lawmaking. Because of his knowledge of the area (as for instance reflected in his excellent book When International Law Works), his comments are very valuable. In fact, the comments touch upon an essential debate that was started by the book,...

...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...

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...

Over the next three days we are bringing you a discussion of a brand new book, edited by Joost Pauwelyn (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva), Ramses Wessel (University of Twente, The Netherlands) and Jan Wouters (University of Leuven, Belgium), on Informal International Lawmaking, published by Oxford University Press. Here is the abstract provided by the publisher: Many international norms that have emerged in recent years are not set out in formal treaties. They are not concluded in formal international organizations. They frequently involve actors other than formal...

...Whelan must really be focused only on the specter of so-called “transnationalist” judges overturning the will of democratically elected leaders. But this concern is also without foundation. After all, when interpreting constitutional provisions, not a single sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice has taken the position that international or foreign law constitutes binding authority. As to concerns about customary international law, there are, as Whelan points out, hundreds of pages of academic debate on the precise nuances of how customary international law and federal common law interact, but the key point...

...to COVID-19. National health systems have frequently neglected public health systems for disease prevention, and national responses have undermined sexual and reproductive health and rights, disproportionately impacted a range of marginalized populations, and failed to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. Echoing criticisms from authorities within the UN human rights system, independent reviews of the WHO response have taken states to task for, amongst other things, their inability or unwillingness to cooperate in adopting human rights-based approaches to preventing and curtailing public health emergencies. These violative public health responses have...

...old chestnut in legal theory, and in making some interesting methodological claims about the best way to conduct a jurisprudential argument about the concept of law. With respect to the philosophy of international law, on the other, the authors broach the neglected question of the legality of international law, and rightly deem it an important issue and not one that is trumped by others such as the legitimacy of international law in particular. In this response, I question the authors’ argument with respect, first of all, to their underlying reasoning...