Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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,...

...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...

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...

...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...

Starting this coming Tuesday, Opinio Juris is pleased to host a joint symposium with the Yale Law Journal on a new article by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, Outcasting: Enforcement in Domestic and International Law. Here’s the abstract: This Article offers a new way to understand the enforcement of domestic and international law that we call “outcasting.” Unlike the distinctive method that modern states use to enforce their law, outcasting is nonviolent: it does not rely on bureaucratic organizations, such as police or militia, that employ physical force to maintain...

[Christopher N.J. Roberts is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School.] This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 54(1) symposium. Other posts from this series can be found in the related posts below. Convergence The most important studies stimulate a host of unlikely conversations. In this regard, “Getting to Rights,” a path-breaking article that examines the effect of international rights texts on domestic constitutions and practices does not fall short. Its contribution to the literature on rights convergence is already part of...

[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...

[Heike Krieger is Professor of Public Law and International Law at Freie Universitaet Berlin and Co-Chair of the Berlin Potsdam Research Group on The International Rule of Law – Rise or Decline? This is the fifth post in the Defining the Rule of Law Symposium, based on this article (free access for six months). The first is here, the second, here, the third here, the fourth here and the fifth here. ] The awareness of a crisis of international law is widespread. The multiplicity of challenges which the international order...