Go On! ILW 2010

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

The 89th annual meeting of the American Branch of the International Law Association will be held October 21 through 23 in New York City.

The theme of International Law Weekend 2010 is International Law and Institutions: Advancing Justice, Security and Prosperity.

Topics listed on the Schedule of Events include many on which IntLawGrrls have posted; for example:

► Kosovo advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice

► International Criminal Court post-Kampala

► Climate change

► Lisbon Treaty of the European Union

► International child abduction

► Corporate social responsibility

► International development law

► Targeted killing

Co-Chairs of this year's meeting are Professor Elizabeth Burleson (far left) of the University of South Dakota Law School, Hanna Dreifeldt Lainé (near left) of the U.N. Office of Legal Affairs, Vincent J. Vitkowsky, a partner at the New York law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, and ILSA Program Coordinator Jill Schmieder Hereau.

All attendees are encouraged to preregister for space reasons. Registration is free to members of ABILA, the International Law Students Association and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and of the many cosponsoring entities, such as the American Society of International Law, whose President, our colleague David D. Caron, will give a keynote address. For persons not members of such groups, the registration fee is $75.

Further details here.

American woman at ICJ?

Talk about action.

No sooner had we signed off on the post below respecting women judges at The Hague than we heard word that another soon may be donning robes.

Rumor has it -- most likely an accurate rumor, given the source is our OJ colleague Roger Alford -- Joan Donoghue has been chosen to fill the U.S. vacancy at the International Court of Justice, located in the Peace Palace pictured at left.

Said to have been chosen by the U.S. national group, Donoghue, Principal Deputy in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the Department of State, would be poised to join that court along with another woman, diplomat Xue Hanqin, whom, as noted below, China's nominated to fill its vacant seat.

Donoghue's photo couldn't be found on the web. Her bio doesn't appear on the State Department weblist, though she's been with State Department for more than a decade. A web search indicates that back in 1994, as Assistant Legal Adviser for African Affairs, she was involved in State's efforts to define "genocide" in the context of massacres in Rwanda. In 2008, she gave testimony before a Senate committee on international regulation of doping in sports. Now a top aide to Legal Adviser Harold Hongju Koh, she served as Acting Legal Adviser early in the Obama Administration, while Koh's nomination was pending. On account of that title, her name also crops up in lots of early 2009 Guantánamo-related cybertraffic.

Roger reports that Donoghue was chosen over IntLawGrrls' own Lucy Reed and our colleague David D. Caron, respectively the immediate past and current Presidents of the American Society of International Law.

LOST no more?

Sorry, this is not a commentary on that survivalist series that seems to have taken couch potatoes by storm; check out that TV show if you must. But check out too a new ASIL Insight into another LOST: the Law of the Sea Treaty concluded in 1982, to which 153 other countries already belong. In their commentary our colleagues David D. Caron and Harry N. Scheiber explain how the opposition of a very few -- among them the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1st woman ever to serve as the United States' Ambassador to the United Nations -- stymied U.S. accession to a convention which enjoys the support of the

Defense Department, the State Department, the Commerce Department, the U.S. Coast Guard, the oil industry, the shipping industry, and the fishing sector, as well as environmental and conservation non-governmental organizations and religious organizations.

In mid-May U.S. President George W. Bush urged the Senate to give its advice and consent. "Senate delay may prove costly since treaties without leadership can decay," Caron and Scheiber write, sounding a warning that can be applied to other contexts, too.
(For news of another ocean-related treaty regime, see above.)