Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...a ‘means-end proportionality’ approach with the focus on restoring state’s defensive capacity, it is possible for a nuclear strike to be lawful, even if not commensurate to anticipated attack. To this end, the NPR implicitly assumes that a limited nuclear strike could be less destructive than a large scale conventional response. The employment of tactical nuclear weapons, which allow for the precise targeting, could be justified as a measure to halt the imminent attack, which, if occurring, would require much more destructive a response. It leaves us though with the...

book, The Law on the Use of Force: a Feminist Analysis (Routledge, 2011) where I argue: A prescriptive analogy assumes the correlation of domestic legal categories with international legal categories and, therefore, explains international legal justifications for violence by drawing upon domestic legal justifications for violence. In contrast, the conceptual analysis developed in this book does not assume the sameness of international and domestic legal structures instead, it seeks, to expose concepts developed in Western domestic legal orders that are assumed to exist in the international legal system. . ....

has territorial jurisdiction in Palestine. The Court faces a crucial decision: either it recognises that the ICC has judicial oversight over international crimes in Palestine (by virtue of the reasons put forth by my colleagues in this symposium), or it decides that Palestine remains in the blind spot of international justice, a legal black hole of where impunity is granted for the most serious crimes of international concern. As such, in accepting or rejecting territorial jurisdiction over Palestine, the Court will be forced to clarify its position within international law:...

Opinio Juris is pleased to announce an online symposium addressing social activism and international law. As our readers know, Kony 2012 was a YouTube sensation, spreading faster than any video in history. Although the details are airbrushed, the central theme of the video is about international law. The key idea of the video is that the indicted fugitive Joseph Kony should be brought to justice before the International Criminal Court to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Millions of viewers who never thought about the International Criminal...

[Jens David Ohlin is Associate Professor of Law at Cornell University Law School.] This post is part of our symposium on the latest issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I agree with almost everything in Darryl Robinson’s plea for a cosmopolitan liberal approach to international criminal justice. Robinson’s article sketches out the development of ICL scholarship, noting the beginnings of the field, followed by the liberal critique of early ICL development, and then the counter-critique...

...Begg's book: "It'll all be over one day," in the London Review of Books, Vol. 28, No. 11 (8 June 2006), 10-12. Seamus 'I think it would behoove everyone who fairly wrestles with these questions to admit that there is no easy or simple answer here.' The Bush administration appears to have found an easy answer to at least one question, to wit: UPDATE: Pentagon Orders U.S. Reporters to Exit Guantanamo Please see stories in EDITOR & PUBLISHER (link at TalkLeft), Los Angeles Times, etc. Seamus Regarding the expression 'the...

...and current overview of treaty law and practice for academics and practitioners alike. It combines 25 chapters on all the basic issues that arise in treaty-making, (including formation, application, interpretation and exit) with a survey of common treaty clauses, including 350 examples from existing treaties. The book is due in print this summer, but feel free to pre-order your copy now. I’m sure I’ll blog about it more in the coming months (as well as a few treaty-related issues I picked up along the way). For now, however, I’d love...

I know we will be having a discussion of Tom Farer’s book on a grand liberal strategy for dealing with terrorism down the road, but I wanted to note that the general issue of ‘grand strategy’ is at the heart of Philip Bobbitt’s new book, Terror and Consent. It has deservedly been widely reviewed and highly praised – Ferguson in the New York Times Book Review, for example – “the most profound book on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 – indeed since the end...

Professor Lederman asks in a comment to Professor Kent’s post if we could clarify our disagreement on the President’s power to respond to attacks. Briefly, here is how I understand it. I think both of us agree: (1) That Congress has the ultimate control over the U.S. response to an attack, in that it can limit the response by statute, or simply refuse to approve funding for certain kinds of responses; and (2) That in the absence of statutory approval the President can “repel sudden attacks” (as Madison said at...

...so while anticipating and preparing for armed resistance from the host/target state. And host/target states which have not granted permission for others to use force on their territory will assert a right to defend their sovereignty by treating such uses of force as aggression, and by responding with force if they so choose. The host/target state’s response, though theoretically unlawful, is very likely to occur and is something that any state relying upon the “unable or unwilling” standard will both anticipate and factor in to its decision to use force....

My friend Dapo Akande takes me to task today at EJIL: Talk! for my position on drone strikes directed at combatants attending a funeral or helping the wounded. I will address his curious reluctance to address the text of the Rome Statute in Part II of my response; in this post, I want to address his arguments concerning IHL. Here are the key paragraphs: First of all, Article 51(2) which prohibits attacks on the civilian population and individual civilians does not simply prohibits attacks but rather makes it illegal to...

...prong. This is why it has been long considered by both the Bush and Obama administrations to be covert action, not TMA. If the covert-action statute is capable of conferring the benefits of the public-authority justification, then, it does so here. I think this response elides the difference between two different situations: (1) where the military wants to use force covertly against al-Qaeda; and (2) where the CIA wants to use force covertly against al-Qaeda. As Bobby’s article brilliantly explains, the TMA language was included in Title 50 because neither...