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A short primer on arguments over the law and ethics of autonomous weapon systems, appearing in The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation, and Technology, just out from Oxford University Press (July 2017). → Read More
Using location coordinates and other intelligence supplied by French special forces to hunt down high-value French targets, Iraqi artillery and ground troops have killed French nationals fighting for ISIS during the battle to drive the extremist group from Mosul, Iraq. → Read More
A Brief Review of Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World, by Paul Collier and Alexander Betts (Oxford UP, forthcoming September 2017) → Read More
Wherein Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, sends a formal letter of summons to the English upon the siege of Orleans. → Read More
This special Readings post on the conflict in Syria comes from The Onion. → Read More
Bloomberg economics commentator Justin Fox explains in a recent column why comparing the odds of getting killed in a terrorist attack and slipping and fatally falling in the bathtub is a fundamental misuse of statistics. → Read More
The Supreme Court punted on the question of corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute in its 2013 Kiobel decision; corporate liability is once again the explicit question in a case accepted by the Court on April 3, 2017, Jesner v. Arab Bank, No. 16-499. → Read More
Emory University's Laurie Blank discusses the meaning of the right of a state to use force against terrorist groups and violent extremists, in a forthcoming article in the Israel Yearbook of Human Rights, now posted to SSRN, and in a short column in the Jurist → Read More
Alan Z. Rozenshtein, a former contributor to Lawfare who now works at DOJ, has a new article forthcoming in Stanford Law Review, "Surveillance Intermediaries," analyzing the role of corporate actors such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and others, that dominate digital communications and data storage, situated between government and targets of surveillance. → Read More
Adam Pearlman is a lawyer with the Department of Defense who, in his private capacity, has a new article posted to SSRN titled "GQ: The Guantanamo Quagmire" (27 Stanford Law and Public Policy Review 101 (2016)). The article considers why, so many years on, the Guantanamo detentions continue to be such a point of legal and moral controversy. Pearlman's article is particularly useful (especially… → Read More
In light of the coup attempt in Turkey (still apparently underway at this writing), I want to note a fairly recent book on coup d'etats from a political science perspective - Naunihal Singh's Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups (Johns Hopkins Press 2014). Singh is a professor at the Air War College in Alabama, and this volume appears to be a published version of his… → Read More
BYU law professor Eric Talbot Jensen has a new article posted to SSRN (appearing in Brigham Young University Law Review) titled, "Presidential Pronouncements of Customary International Law as an Alternative to the Senate's Advice and Consent." Very interesting and well worth reading. Abstract (31 pp. pdf): > The Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law of the United States has thus far… → Read More
Last week I noted that the foreign ministries of Russia and China announced plans to issue a joint statement on the "promotion of international law" during the June 25, 2016 visit of President Vladimir Putin to China. The statement has now been posted to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. The joint statement is not long and overall appears to reaffirm long-held views of both… → Read More
Happy Independence Day to Americans everywhere! My wife and I are on vacation in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains of California, a part of it called the Owens Valley (which, His Serenity notes in passing, is God’s Own Country). We watched fireworks last night put on by the Paiute-Shoshone Indian Reservation in the town of Bishop, sponsored by the tribe’s Indian veterans post (which has a… → Read More
Americans (myself included) have not tended to be attentive to the Great War. Our attention is focused on World War II, and we think of the Great War as "World War I" - and the "First" merely as wind-up to the "Second." It took me a long time to understand intellectually that the 20th century (and the 21st as well, to judge by current events in the Middle East) takes place in the shadow of the… → Read More
Over the past decade, military drones, whether weaponized or merely equipped for surveillance, have been at the center of many heated arguments, whether about targeted killing, counterterrorism, the supposedly "too easy" resort to force through drones, and a host of other controversies. Philosophers, anthropologists, and other academics have given us social theories of the drone. Some military… → Read More
As I write this review, the airwaves are abuzz (let’s amend that: Twitter is abuzz) with reports that the Democrats’ “oppo file” on Donald Trump has been hacked by Russians or someone-or-other and will be imminently released to great consternation and gnashing of teeth. And, separately, Wikileaks has announced that it will release some apparent trove of damning documents on Hillary Clinton and… → Read More
Although drone warfare to date has overwhelmingly been analyzed in the context of US operations against non-state actors - Al Qaeda or affiliated groups or, more recently, ISIS - much of the impact of drones on warfare is likely to come in the markedly different environment of state-to-state conflict (or near conflict) in the Asia Pacific ocean. The conflict environment, not to put too fine a… → Read More
According to a statement issued today by the Russian Foreign Ministry (thanks to the OUP International Law Blog for flagging it), during the upcoming June 25, 2016 state visit of the Russian president to China, the "foreign ministers of both countries are planning to sign a declaration on increasing the role of international law." It will (according to Tass' report) set out a > common approach… → Read More
The Oxford Handbook of the Use of Force in International Law (edited by the highly distinguished Cambridge University international law scholar Marc Weller) labors under two handicaps before ever reaching the book's content. First, at over $200 in hardback on Amazon, only readers with easy access to a decent law library will be able even to lay eyes on the volume (and the Kindle edition is… → Read More