Author: Duncan B. Hollis

Hollis_Cyberlaw_June2015

Autonomous Legal Reasoning: Legal and Ethical Issues in the Technologies of Conflict

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One of the highlights of my Fall semester was the opportunity to host a one-day workshop at Temple Law on how autonomous technology may impact the future of international humanitarian law (IHL) and the lawyers who practice it.  With co-sponsorship from the International Committee of the Red Cross (specifically, Rob Ramey and Tracey Begley) as well as Gary Brown of Marine Corps University, we wanted to have an inter-disciplinary conversation on the way autonomy may implicate the practice of law across a range of new technologies, including cyberwar, drones, and the potential for fully autonomous lethal weapons.  Although these technologies share common characteristics — most notably their ability (and sometimes their need) to operate in the absence of direct human control — discursive silos have emerged where these technologies tend to be discussed in isolation. Our workshop sought to bridge this divide by including experts on all three technologies from an array of disciplinary backgrounds, including IHL, political science, and ethics (see here for a list of participants).  Fortunately, the day itself lived up to the hype, with a detailed …

Data Hacking

Cyber War – A Duty to Hack and the Boundaries of Analogical Reasoning

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Back in 2012, I was pleased to receive an invitation to a conference that Jens, Kevin Govern, and Claire Finkelstein were hosting on the law and ethics of cyberwar.  It was a great conversation; so great, in fact, that Jens and his colleagues were inspired to use it as the launching pad for this volume — Cyberwar: Law and Ethics for Virtual Conflicts.  They asked me to write a chapter on an idea I’d been thinking about since my first foray into the cyber arena back in 2007 — whether and when IHL (international humanitarian law, or the law of armed conflict for those of you trained in the United States) might involve a duty to hack?  The basic idea was straightforward — if a cyber-operation could achieve a military objective (say disabling a power grid or a war-supporting factory’s operations) without killing anyone or causing any lasting damage to the facility, shouldn’t IHL require States to employ it in lieu of kinetic operations that might cause civilian casualties or property damage? Looking at the …

Alter Hall Flags

Interpretation and International Law

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As an activity, interpretation in international law is ubiquitous, involving all types of facts, processes, doctrines, values, and theories. As a concept, however, international legal interpretation has played a much smaller role. Until recently, international lawyers largely associated interpretation with a limited set of objects (treaties), methods (those found in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties), and functions (the exposition of meanings). In this short chapter, I problematize such traditional understandings of interpretation in international law. I explain how standard accounts oversimplify interpretation’s role in the treaty context; international law has moved beyond the Vienna Convention’s text to include larger questions about treaty interpretation’s scope, nature, and purpose. At the same time, interpretation’s fixation on treaties understates its potential to reach additional objects, methods, and functions. The proliferation of international tribunals, institutions, and non-treaty instruments offer new objects for interpretation that require methodologies beyond the Vienna Convention, whether drawn from law or other disciplines. And, while the core of interpretation retains its expository function, the concept can (and does) serve other functions, …

Duncan Hollis

Obama Might Have Committed the US to Iran Nuke Deal Before Congress Can Vote on It

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James E. Beasley Professor of Law Duncan Hollis is quoted in this piece by Vice News on the Iran nuclear deal. According to legal scholars, the deal is technically more of a “political commitment” than it is a treaty. Therefore, a potential veto-proof majority in Congress that rejects the agreement might prove to be of little legal consequence in determining the fate of the pact. Read the full article here.