Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
16 Oct Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: Conceptual Approaches
...what legal regime, if any, is applicable to them. This, in turn, leads to the third connotation of “informal”: the sense, real or perceived, that it dispenses with or circumvents the formal strictures, controls and accountability mechanisms of formal law. This goes to the heart of IN-LAW: Even though it may be a more effective way of solving cross-border problems, is it, ultimately, an end-run on democracy (more on this by Jan in a third post)? Part I of the book offers conceptual approaches to IN-LAW from different perspectives: legal...07 Jul America Between the Wars or the New James Bond?
The day, a few weeks ago, when America Between the Wars arrived on my doorstop also saw the arrival of another book via Amazon … Sebastian Faulks-as-Ian Fleming, The Devil May Care. The serious policy-history tome or the new James Bond novel? What to do, what to do? I idly picked up America Between the Wars, assuming that within nanoseconds I would get bored and flip over to Bond – but no, I found myself quite entranced with this book of 1990s history. I finished it before ever returning to...
03 Dec UNSC Veto Power Symposium: Reflections on Trahan’s Book
[Roger Clark is the Board of Governors Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School; he also represented Samoa in the negotiations on the International Criminal Court.] Jennifer Trahan’s new book, Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes (CUP 2020) is, I believe, destined to be one of the most influential of the many books that are hitting the bookshelves in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the creation of the United Nations. The opening word of the title, Existing, captures the essence of...
22 Apr Symposium: Practical and Doctrinal Challenges and Developments of the Responsibility to Protect
...lawyers will—or should—appreciate the reality check on the limitations of individual state action via universal jurisdiction cases, an increasingly popular alternative avenue to justice. I cannot speak for Nahlawi, but I interpreted this as a way of expressing support for international justice mechanisms, which do not exist for Syria other than the evidence-gathering/case-file-preparing International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM). As an RtoP tool, the IIIM is perhaps all the more valuable for indicating practice and opinio juris that non-UNSC UN bodies (here, the UNGA) are empowered to discuss and make...22 Sep Book Symposium: Cyber War–Introduction
...Cyber War – Law and Ethics for Virtual Conflicts , explores cyber warfare’s moral and legal issues in three categories. First, it addresses foundational questions regarding cyber attacks. What are they and what does it mean to talk about a cyber war? State sponsored cyber warriors as well as hackers employ ever more sophisticated and persistent means to penetrate government computer systems; in response, governments and industry develop more elaborate and innovative defensive systems. The book presents alternative views concerning whether the laws of war should apply, whether transnational criminal...13 Dec Blogging the Copenhagen Climate Talks and Climate Finance, More Generally
We are also looking forward to contributions this week from Andrew Guzman of Berkeley Law, co-author (with Jody Freeman) of the recent article Sea Walls are Not Enough: Climate Change and U.S. Interests and author of the forthcoming book Climate Change and the Apocalypse (my kudos on the choice of title). readers may remember that we have previously hosted a book discussion of Andrew’s book How International Law Works. We welcome him back. Finally, we are pleased to have five contributors from the new book Climate Finance: Regulatory Funding and...
12 Jul Intervention in Civil Wars Symposium: The Importance (and Limitations) of Legitimacy During Foreign Intervention in Civil Wars
excellent book Intervention in Civil Wars: Effectiveness, Legitimacy, and Human Rights (Hart, 2021). Redaelli’s book makes an important contribution to the impressive scholarship on the use of force published in the last decade. This scholarship has only grown in relevance following several notable instances of foreign states intervening in civil wars. In this sense, Redaelli’s work is as timely as it is interesting and serves as a natural follow-up to Eliav Lieblich’s outstanding book International Law and Civil War (Routledge, 2013). Legal Nuance and Historical Context There are many things...
14 Feb Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: On “Unproblematic Eurocentrism” and the Rewriting of International Law
...the other” and makes express reference to the fact that the selection of these manuals factored three criteria: “impact, chronology and geography”. In terms of impact, “[c]are was taken to include the most influential textbooks”, like Wheaton, Bluntschli, Calvo, Martens and Oppenheim. Chronologically, the book covers a century, between 1815 and 1914. In terms of geography, the book covers manuals from England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, the United States, Argentina, Peru, and Bolivia (pp. 16-17). It is these criteria for inclusion that spark most of my questions and hesitations....18 May Book Discussion “Outsourcing War and Peace”: Contractor Accountability as a Barrier to SOFAs
[Scott Horton is a Contributing Editor of Harper’s Magazine and a Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School.] This is the fourth 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. It’s useful generally to turn the accountability issue on its head and to view the question from the sovereign’s perspective. Laura’s book takes a view of this question largely from the perspective of a single sovereign, the United States....