All posts tagged: International Law

The Rome Colosseum

Pizza, Pasta, and Prada: Why You Should Participate in Temple Law’s Rome Summer Program

For most people, pizza, pasta, and Prada are the only reasons they need to visit the Eternal City. As a law student, however, we must give careful consideration to how we spend our time and money at this critical time in our careers. Almost a year after enrolling in the Rome Program, I look back on those warm, sunny days and appreciate not only the cultural and culinary aspects of the trip, but also the academic and educational aspects that enriched my law school experience. Take classes you wouldn’t otherwise take Between bar courses, practicums, and writing requirements, six semesters is just not enough time to delve into every appealing legal topic. The Rome Program gives you the opportunity to sneak in 3-5 credits worth of classes you might not otherwise take. For students interested in international law, Rome is an opportunity to complete prioritized classes faster than they would otherwise. I would have graduated without having taken a single international law class had it not been for Rome. This means I would have left …

Passports

Stuck With Two Passports

As it is wont to every few years, dual citizenship has become a contentious issue in contemporary politics. In the wake of the November 2015 attacks in Paris, French President François Hollande is pressing for a constitutional amendment that would allow convicted terrorists with dual nationality to be stripped of their French citizenship. Political elites on the French left have attacked the proposal as violating principles of equality, as it does not apply to citizens of only France; the move, they argue, would signify that dual nationals are somehow less French and that their French identity is more expendable than those who don’t have another citizenship. In December the U.S. Congress barred dual nationals of Iran, Syria, Iraq and Sudan from visa exemptions that they would otherwise enjoy as citizens of European Union nations and certain other countries. The measure — which a group of senators is now proposing to alter — also restricts the visa-free movement of individuals who have recently traveled to these countries, on the theory that it would prevent potential jihadists from re-entering the …

Hezbollah’s Empty Seat at the Syria Peace Talks in Vienna

The recent attacks in Paris have added enormous world pressure for the United States, Russia, and Iran to decide the future of Bashar al-Assad and Syria. The US cites Assad’s alleged war crimes and lack of legitimacy as the reasons why his departure must accompany any political solution. Russia and Iran counter that it is not up to the US or its allies to determine the political landscape of a post-war Syria. But mention of Hezbollah is noticeably missing from most official statements on all sides, yet it may be the crux of the debate. And, as Western social media and news bickered over the disparate coverage that the terrorist attack in south Beirut received, they largely ignored the relevance of the target. The ISIS attack in Beirut was mainly directed not at Lebanon but at Hezbollah. The United States and Hezbollah, while united only in their struggle against ISIS, have the same public relations conundrum—how to portray a Hezbollah that is fighting takfiri terrorists instead of Israel? Hezbollah uses the word takfiri, or one …

Data Hacking

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

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

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, …