Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

Hostage Response... The members of the Assembly of State Parties remain bound by the terms of their own acceptance of the protocols of the Statute. Article 125 stipulates that the UN Secretary General will serve as the depositary, and that the Rome Statute is open for signature by all states. The protocols of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (See Articles 81 and 83) and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (see Articles 48 and 50) contain a standing invitation for the member states of UN specialized agencies,...

commenter I think your response further undermines your argument. The fact that an earlier proposal to place restrictions on the use of the veto was withdrawn demonstrates that any "accelerated evolution" in the law in this area has moved it even further away from any "responsibility not to veto". Second the fact that states (1) are proposing different forms of voluntary restraint and (2) are not claiming that these vetos violate existing law, can only support the claim that existing law does not impose constraints on the veto, or at...

...of a consistent (hence non-arbitrary) notion of human rights, of the equalizing logic of meaningful distributive justice, of the truly universal application of democratic principles and values. It is the communitarian critique redux and writ large, and no less impotent for all that: as Stephen Holmes amply demonstrated in several books, its fears and complaints amount to an impressive inability to appreciate the myriad historical and political virtues of the Liberal tradition from Hobbes through Rawls, the selfsame virtues that made possible democratic constitutions and ways of governance (I know,...

can find the Volokh Conspiracy’s intro post here. And here is a roundup of links to sources that debunk the book and/or its underlying academic studies: A forthcoming article by Carnegie-Mellon’s John Gasper. An analysis by Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth. An analysis by Geoff Nunberg, a linguistics professor at Berkeley. Critical thoughts by Columbia’s Andrew Gelman. An analysis by Media Matters. Not surprisingly, the authors of the book have received funding from the usual conservative suspects, such as AEI, The Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institute....

...in his magisterial book “Armed Attack” and Article 51 of the UN Charter (p. 155): In the end, customary practice suggests that, subject to the necessity and proportionality criteria, even small-scale bombings, artillery, naval or aerial attacks qualify as ‘armed attacks’ activating Article 51 UN Charter, as long as they result in, or are capable of resulting in destruction of property or loss of lives. By contrast, the firing of a single missile into some uninhabited wasteland as a mere display of force, in contravention of Article 2(4) UN Charter,...

...project of participatory ethnic nationalism in Georgia. Taken together, these failures risk tying US policy to a standard of Georgian behavior in war, conflict, control of non-ethnic Georgian territories – to the US asserting a frankly romanticized standard of Georgian goodness and purity – that, as a matter of history, even recent history, they have not managed to meet. US responses should be tied to Russian ill-doing, which are legion, not unlikely assertions of Georgian virtue. There is, in my view, no reason why the US response should be any...

No doubt the phrase ‘armed attack’ must be construed broadly enough to permit some anticipatory response. But it is a very different matter to expand it to include threatening deployments or demonstrations that do not have imminent attack as their purpose or probable outcome. To accept that reading is to make the occasion for forceful response essentially a question for unilateral national decision that would not only be formally unreviewable, but not subject to intelligent criticism either… In this sense, I believe an Article 51 defence would have signalled that...

...someone of being a murderer. But that isn’t the worst claim in the above paragraph. I find particularly troubling Ní Aolain’s suggestion that an “organized” response to the original petition (ie, two professors wrote a response and asked others who agreed with them to sign it) might make “younger scholars” “feel unable to articulate their discomfort” (ie, publicly accuse a respected scholar of being a murderer) because of potential career repercussions. Does she have any evidence for the idea that the signatories to the counter-petition are going to persecute the...

...history to determine whether the coalition attack on Afghanistan was a legal response by the United States and its coalition partners in an act of self-defense after the 9/11 attack. I remember that the Administration was very dismissive of what the Taliban offered in response to the request to turn over certain Al-Qaeda persons. I have tended to think Afghanistan worked as a matter of self-defense and in light of the September 12 UNSC resolution but I have felt so duped by this administration on so many things that I...

[Sonja B. Starr is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.] This post is part of the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics Vol. 45, No. 1 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. In Policing International Prosecutors, Jenia Iontcheva Turner offers a rich account of the competing interests at stake in cases involving international prosecutors’ misconduct, and advances a strong case that remedial doctrines should squarely acknowledge those competing interests. Because international law has often struggled...

...overlapping actors—mirrors the challenges found in human rights implementation. In that sense, how can we draw lessons from blockchain governance to strengthen accountability in similarly decentralized human rights frameworks?  A promising analogy comes from what scholars and regulators have termed the “Global Financial Architecture.” This framework emerged in response to the 2007–2009 global financial crisis, spurred on by the G-20, which recognized that financial stability (here, here) in an interconnected world required coordination and standard-setting beyond any single country or organization. Within this architecture, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) stands...