ASIL International Refugee Law Interest Group

We welcome and celebrate the creation of a new Interest Group in International Refugee Law, launched through the American Society of International Law. As IntLawGrrls have often posted, the plight of refugees and internally displaced persons touches on a number of fields of study, including Human Rights Law, Humanitarian Law, International Criminal Law, and the Law of International Organizations. We note that refugee law also hosts huge implications for gender and gender studies, as women and children vastly outnumber men as both refugees and displaced persons. The issues that impact refugees and displaced persons, such as lack of shelter and housing, lack of physical security, inability to receive an education, lack of employment options, lack of access to status determination processes, and the attendant psychosocial impacts of those difficulties therefore impact women to a greater degree than men, and arguably exacerbate existing gender inequality.
The interest group focuses on the few existing fora that exist for sharing information across issues related to refugee law and aims to fill that gap. It aims to provide a cyber meeting place to cross reference materials available through multiple resources, such as NGOs dealing with refugee and IDP topics, IGO networks for exchanging information on, e.g., the various national guidelines for refugee status determination, as well as academic scholarship and practitioner's observations on refugee law. The creation of this interest group fills a gap within the field of refugee law and should provide several tools for those concerned with refugees and displaced persons to better access and share information.

Post co-authored by Dina Francesca Haynes and Jaya Ramji-Nogales

Go On! History of International Law in the Supreme Court

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

Santa Clara University School of Law this Friday and Saturday (Nov. 6 & 7) will host a conference on The History of International Law in the Supreme Court. Here is the conference description:

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Supreme Court has decided a series of high-profile cases related to international law. In Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain (2004), the Court considered the federal judiciary's role in applying customary international law under the Alien Tort Statute. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Roper v. Simmons (2005), the Court used international law as a tool for helping to resolve difficult constitutional issues arising under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), the Court grappled with questions involving the proper interpretation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. In Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon (2006) and Medellin v. Texas (2008), the Court confronted questions involving the U.N. Charter, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the domestic effects of judgments of the International Court of Justice.
Each of these decisions produced fairly strident dissents.
In almost every case, the dissent accused the majority of departing significantly from established precedents. During this conference, scholars will evaluate recent Supreme Court decisions involving international law against the backdrop of eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century precedents and historical developments. The main questions to be addressed are: In what respects do the twenty-first century decisions represent a break from the past? In what respects are those decisions consistent with earlier practice and precedents? From a historical perspective, how can we account for both the continuity and the discontinuity?
The first day of the conference will focus on the history of international law in the Supreme Court from 1789 to 2000. The second day will focus on key Supreme Court cases decided in the past decade, evaluating those cases against the backdrop of the historical analysis developed on day one. Revised versions of the conference papers will be collected in a book published by Cambridge University Press.

The conference schedule is here.
The table of contents for the Cambridge book, edited by Prof. David Sloss (right), the Direct of Santa Clara's Center for Global Law & Policy, is here.