Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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...

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 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...

...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)...

[ Wai Wai Nu , originally from Myanmar, is the Founder and Executive Director of the Women’s Peace Network. Grant Shubin is a Senior Legal Advisor with the Global Justice Center.] This post forms part of the Opinio Juris Symposium on Reproductive Violence in International Law, in which diverse authors reflect on how the International Criminal Court and other jurisdictions have responded to violations of reproductive health and reproductive autonomy. The symposium complements a one-day conference to be held on 11 June 2024,  in which legal practitioners, scholars, activists, and...

The Melbourne Journal of International Law is delighted to continue our partnership with Opinio Juris. This week will feature three articles from Issue 13(1) of the Journal. The full issue is available for download here. Today, our discussion commences with Spencer Zifcak’s article ‘The Responsibility to Protect after Libya and Syria’. Professor Zifcak draws on the disparate responses to the humanitarian disasters of Libya and Syria to examine the current status of the Responsibility to Protect. The respondents to this piece will be Ramesh Thakur and Thomas Weiss. On Thursday,...

This post is part of the Yale Journal of International Law Volume 37, Issue 2 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Margaux J. Hall is a Consultant in the Justice Reform Practice Group of the World Bank’s Legal Vice Presidency. She is based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. David C. Weiss is an Associate in the Antitrust and Competition practice group at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in New York. All views expressed herein are the authors’ own. We would first...

means that the overlap between self-defence and IHL is greatly reduced compared to the “jus ad bellum approach” under (a). For instance, the use of force by an enemy combatant in an international armed conflict is lawful and therefore the use of force in response would only be governed by IHL; the criminal law concept of self-defence cannot justify the use of force in response. It is however unclear whether the same is true in relation to the use of force by a civilian directly participating in hostilities or a...

[ Boravin Tann is a researcher and lecturer at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law based at the Royal University of Law and Economics (RULE), Cambodia. Rosemary Grey is a Senior Lecturer at Sydney Law School, The University of Sydney.] This post forms part of the Opinio Juris Symposium on Reproductive Violence in International Law, in which diverse authors reflect on how the International Criminal Court and other jurisdictions have responded to violations of reproductive health and reproductive autonomy. The symposium complements a one-day conference to be held...

...ICJ has convened the blog symposium that starts with the present blog. Having a well-structured and conceptually coherent draft is an essential component of an international negotiation, but it is not everything. Like its predecessor, the 2019 Draft, the 2020 Revised version of the treaty is a positive step that contains welcome improvements that could be debated in a substantive intergovernmental negotiation. But, it is well known that so far there has been limited amount of negotiation among a critical mass of States, with some of what has taken place...