Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...tradition. Students in Asia experience, it seems to me, various forms of dissonance between the local and international, between the promise of international justice and the historic experience of international injustice, between law and politics (It is an interesting approach to present the TWAIL approach as the standard approach. My friend and colleague Susan Marks has told me how she presents both the classic and TWAIL versions of international law and that students find the TWAIL account more persuasive. This of course is very gratifying, but I am glad that...

results reflecting the fundamental principles underlying international humanitarian law. The author concludes by highlighting and comparing the main areas of concern arising with regard to state-sponsored targeted killing under each normative paradigm and by placing the results of the analysis in the greater context of the rule of law. The book is obviously very timely, given the debate (see, for example, here and here) about the legality of the recent U.S. airstrike in Somalia. I hope to organize a mini-symposium on the book in the near future. Until then, buy...

...really in doubt. Even during armed conflict, we have to see that individuals retain the right against prolonged arbitrary detention as a fundamental human right. This isn't written into the laws of armed conflict, but it is clearly accepted as a fundamental norm applicable during peace and armed conflict by the United States (for instance, this is clearly stated even in the DoD's Operational Law Handbook). The question is, what form of due process is necessary to guarantee this right? I believe that in counter-terrorist or counter-insurgent conflict, especially of...

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,...

...on a ... country,” not “on” a NSA. Gray wrote that “the response of the world in 1998 with respect to the U.S. use of force in self-defense against al Qaeda that “the response of the world was generally muted,” whereas others wrote that most states had “acquiesced” and generally accepted “Article 51's application. See id. At 247-49 n.29, and Mary Ellen at 97 AJIL 446, 450 (2003) (“use of force in Afghanistan in 2001 was lawful self-defense.... September 11 attacks were part of a series of terrorist actions” that...

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...

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....

...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,...

...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...

...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...