Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

In response to Julian Ku’s post here on the potential legal justifications for the U.S. to use force against Syria in the event Assad turns to chemical weapons, Daniel Bethlehem sent along the following. Daniel Bethlehem practices in London and served as Principal Legal Advisor to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 2006-2011. Julian Ku suggests that “[a]ssuming no Security Council approval, I think the U.S. would be in technical violation of the UN Charter [were it to intervene in response to an apparent Syrian chemical weapons threat]. Although...

...Gittings, I am so tired of reading your nonsense. You have no clue as to the law or the complexity of legal issues. You embarrass yourself with each posting that you make, but you lack the basic knowledge to recognize how incredilbly ignorant that you are. You take no hints or the lack of response for what they mean. You present no real points worthy of response or debate. There are no Nazis here, no fascists. That you see them only shows your ignorance of the law and history. Anyone...

...say they have no other choice, except to take the law into their own hands. It gets tiresome to hear platitudinous remarks to the effect that no nation on Earth can tolerate shelling of its citizens, when no other country on Earth would tolerate what the Zionist regimes have done to the Palestinians interned in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank enclaves, including indiscriminate attacks and shelling on a much wider scale than Israel has ever suffered. Response...I generally agree that Israel’s response is being, at the very least,...

As readers know, a few of us on the blog have been debating whether the law of neutrality has any relevance to the United States’ conflict with al-Qaeda. I’m thus delighted to announce that three essays on that very issue are now available on SSRN as part of a mini-symposium hosted by the Texas International Law Journal. The lead essay is by Karl Chang, a lawyer with the Department of Defense; the two (long) responses are by yours truly and by Rebecca Ingber, who is on leave from the State...

I harbored the faint hope that he would turn it down. To the contrary, the idea for him was love at first sight. His dissertation was so good that when it was published by Transnational Publishers, Inc., it came to define the field of humanitarian intervention in international law. Early evidence of this was the fact that the establishment folks in and around the American Society of International Law seemed to have taken a vow of silence about Fernando’s book. As late as 1991, a published symposium on Right versus...

University of Iowa law professor Mark Osiel – an old friend of mine and someone well known to many of us, particularly for his books and writing on mass atrocities – has a new book out, The End of Reciprocity: Terror, Torture, and the Law of War (Cambridge 2009). I’ve read it at pretty high speed – looking for some specific issues on targeted killing, mostly, but I still read it and the notes all the way through – and I want to highly recommend it to our readers. Incisive...

...I how huge such subtleties actually are. Needn't be said that it matters when dealing with the most pivotal topic of peace in the world...that wars, death, destruction can result. I still think Mr. Heller, from a professional point of view, owes his readers a response to your comments. No response is not a resolution, and it leaves deeply caring readers dangling. Kevin Jon Heller Dr J, It's nearly 1:00 am in Melbourne, where I'm currently located, so I will post a substantive response to Hostage in the morning. In...

analysis. There are empirical limitations to this approach. Of course, gleaning the “core values” of the actors involved is difficult given that ethnographic observations and interviews with the participants is out of the question. I’m still on the fence about whether textbooks generate an accurate reflection of the state of the field, or is illustrative of its core identity, despite several interesting studies emerging in recent years; Anthea Roberts’s being the most prominent. This is for the simple reason that those writing international law textbooks tend to derive from a...

...symposium reflects on the ECCC’s trials, tribulations, and legacy. In this post, Christoph Sperfeldt and Rachel Hughes consider the ECCC’s reparations mandate. [ Christoph Sperfeldt is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University and the author of ‘Practices of Reparations in International Criminal Justice’ (Cambridge University Press, 2022).  Rachel Hughes is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, who has previously written for Opinion Juris on the dangers of reclassifying victim information at the ECCC.] When the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)...

...where the injustices embodied in existing laws, social and economic arrangements and distributive outcomes can be challenged with reference to the equal dignity and rights of all human beings. Fulfilling this function is essential to the legitimacy, relevance and power not just of the UN but of the fragile ideals of multilateralism and human rights themselves. It is not only appropriate, but essential, then, to seek to establish within the framework of the UN human rights system a universal normative platform to facilitate the evaluation and critique of the collective...

I will speaking tomorrow at the Barnes Symposium held at the University of South Carolina Law School. The symposium as a whole will discuss the legitimacy of western views of human rights and will have participants from all over the world, both in person and via video conference (a list of speakers is found here). I myself will focus on my little piece of this conversation – the use of international human rights treaties to interpret the U.S. Constitution. If we have any (friendly) readers in the USC community, I...

Out here at the University of Missouri-Columbia we are hosting a symposium this weekend (Feb. 25-26), “Reflections on Judging: A Discussion Following the Release of the Blackmun Papers.” The line-up of speakers includes judges (Duane Benton, 8th Circuit, Colleen McMahon, SDNY), scholars (Suzanna Sherry, Dan Farber, Ellen Deason, Ted Ruger, Greg Sisk, Larry Wrightsman, Joseph Kobylka, Chris Wells, Martha Dragich, Richard Reuben) and at least one Supreme Court watcher, Tony Mauro, discussing Blackmun’s legacy, what we mean by judging, and what makes for “good” or “bad” judges. Full details are...