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Small arms treaty talks soon to resume
A new effort at multilateral regulation of firearms is set to begin Monday at U.N. headquarters in New York. The name for the 10-day diplomatic meeting – Final Conference – expresses hopes for a...
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New Foreign Relations Restatement, topic at American Law Institute annual...
A quarter century having passed since publication of the Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States (right), lawyers are gearing up to produce a Fourth Restatement on the...
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Citizens’ challenges to statutes said to strengthen French constitutional spirit
“‘It took us more than two centuries to admit that a law could be imperfect and the people’s representatives uninspired. That a government and its majority often act too hastily, with the result that...
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This week’s arguments may give glimpse of Supreme Court’s hand in marriage cases
It seems like it was only yesterday that persons who favored marriage equality struggled for broad support. Even in the Left Coast bastion of Berkeley, we who planted “NO ON PROP 8″ lawn signs awoke to...
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“International Law & the Future of Peace”
(What follows are the remarks I delivered earlier today at the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law in Washington. The footnoted version of this speech is available at SSRN...
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US flunks in UN report card on children
Below the surface of many U.S. stories about the plight of the world’s children, the careful reader sees a subtext – a suggestion that it is over there, and not here, that awful things happen to...
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Alien Tort Statute lives to die another day
Perhaps the only surprise in yesterday’s ruling in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum was the vote: the long-running lawsuit, brought by Nigerian-born U.S. asylees, was rejected unanimously by the 9...
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No good news from GTMO; ASIL talk today
‘I wish I had a more positive story to tell. But I see no signs of change.’ Thus was I quoted in “Protesterer for døve ører,” a story that reporter Heidi Taksdal Skjeseth published this morning in...
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The President & the prison camp
President Barack Obama was waiting for the question. That was made clear by the force and length of his Tuesday comments on Guantánamo, where the United States has imprisoned upwards of 800 noncitizens...
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U.S. law & G8 Ministers’ call for donations to Rome Statute’s Trust Fund for...
Notable in the just-released White House recap of its efforts to prevent mass atrocities is the foregrounding of 2 actions this year: ► Enactment in January of “bipartisan legislation to enhance our...
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Civil War’s aftermath & President Wilson’s views on U.S. entry into World War I
AUGUSTA – Who would have guessed that this city at Georgia’s border with South Carolina, now best known as host to a premier golf tourney, used to be home for the boy who grew up to be the United...
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Much to love in Sotomayor’s “World”
My Beloved World is a gem of a memoir. That’s not the least because of who wrote the 300-page volume released this past January. The author is 58-year-old Sonia Sotomayor, who’s served as a Justice of...
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Book on UN offers glimpse of views as Samantha Power readies for hearings
News of Samantha Power’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations prompted me to read her biography of that 68-year-old international organization. In truth, the book is a biography of the...
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Georgia shoutout & more @ Power hearing
Surprised to read, in testimony prepared for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing yesterday, that the nominee to become the United States’ Permanent Representative to the United Nations claims...
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Music sounds & conflicts echo in Salzburg
SALZBURG – I’m newly returned from this Austrian city, years ago my first European home during a semester abroad. Drawing me to the edge of the Alps was the Summer Session of Salzburg Law School on...
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Draft of Obama’s bid for congressional authorization to use military force in...
Kudos to President Barack Obama for deciding to put to the test of democratic deliberation his support for using military force against Syria in the wake of the August 21, 2013, chemical weapons attack...
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How Americans judge military operations
Americans judge U.S. intervention abroad based on the success of the military operation, concludes Wall Street Journal reporter Jess Bravin in an insightful analysis published today. Americans’...
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Senate draft on US use of force in Syria
The newly released draft of what the Senate calls the “Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Government of Syria to Respond to Use of Chemical Weapons” is, well, longer than the...
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Why not sue Syria for torture?
Devoid from much of the U.S. debate about whether to use military force against Syria is any exploration of nonviolent ways to condemn the use of chemical weapons and to push for an end to Syria’s...
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Flashback to a moment of U.S.-Syria thaw
Not so long ago, the United States was looking to mend fences with Syria, as a 2008 Los Angeles Times interview with my colleague Derek Shearer, Occidental College diplomacy professor and former U.S....
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