Go On! Intlaw teaching

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

"Teaching International Law Beyond the Classroom: Engaging Students in Experiential Learning, in Webpages and Blogs, and in Historical and Empirical Research" is the topic of a conference to be held on Friday, May 6, at Pace Law School in White Plains, New York. Cosponsors are the Teaching International Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law and the American Branch of the International Law Association.
Co-chairing the event are IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Cindy Galway Buys (Southern Illinois) and Thomas McDonnell (Pace). Through the conference they aim

to raise awareness on different modalities of teaching and researching in the area of international law to expand beyond the traditional classroom and the standard law review article. Law schools around the country have initiated international law and human rights clinics; International law faculty have increasingly used blogs and the internet to carry out their scholarly work; and the legal academy has begun to recognize the contribution that history and empirical research can make. This workshop explores each of these modalities and attempts to help the participants expand their teaching and research accordingly.

As set forth in full in the program among the many speakers are a number of IntLawGrrl guests/alumnae addition to Cindy: Laura Dickinson (Arizona State), Peggy McGuinness (St. John's), and Beth A. Simmons (Harvard).
Details and registration here.

Behind every successful man

IntLawGrrls' favorite image from this week's doings at U.N. headquarters in New York: U.S. President Barack Obama chairing Thursday's session of the Security Council, flanked by 2 top foreign policy advisors, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, and Dr. Susan E. Rice, Ambassador to the United Nations.

As seen in the U.N. video of the session, unanimously adopted was Res. 1887 (2009), on nuclear nonproliferation. (Hat tip to Peggy McGuinness, IntLawGrrls guest/alumna and charter member of Opinio Juris, whose OJ posts on U.N. happenings have been super.)

Clinton and Rice were by no means the only women foreign policy advisors hard at work this week: U.N. dispatch reported that White House aide Samantha Power (left) spoke at a press briefing Wednesday, following the "first-of-a-kind meeting" between Obama and leaders of countries that comprise the top contributors to U.N. peacekeeping operations. Power (prior posts) is Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council.

ASIL congrats to IntLawGrrls et al.

Delighted to note that a number of IntLawGrrls have just assumed responsibilities within the American Society of International Law:
► IntLawGrrl Hari M. Osofsky is a Co-Chair of the ASIL Annual Meeting Program Committee, as announced in this call for papers post. Hari joins Russ LaMotte and Allen Weiner in that role.
► IntLawGrrls Rebecca Bratspies, Hope Lewis, and Beth Van Schaack, along with IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Chimène Keitner, have been appointed members of the Annual Meeting Program Committee. Joining them are Angela Banks, Curtis Bradley, William Burns, Charles Camp, Anupam Chander, James Gathii, Celia Goldman, Katherine Gorove, Avril Haines, Eckhard Hellbeck, David Kaye, Lillian Aponte Miranda, Steve Pomper, Catherine Powell, Vikram Raghavan, Leila Nadya Sadat, and Natalya Scimeca.
►IntLawGrrl Susana SáCouto is now a member of ASIL's Honors Committee, chaired by Lucinda Lowe. Other members are Doak Bishop, John Cerone, Susan Franck, and Vaughan Lowe.
► Chairing the Awards Committee will be Paul Stephan, aided by members Daphne Barak-Erez, Mark Drumbl, Chiara Giorgetti, and Rob Sloane.
► Nominating Committee Chair is José Alvarez; members are Pieter Bekker, Charles Hunnicutt, Jane Stromseth, Adrien Wing, and Edith Brown Weiss.
► David Kaye and Cymie Payne will join Amy Porges as editors of ASIL Insights, taking up the work of departing editors David Fidler and IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Peggy McGuinness, also an ASIL Executive Council member.
► The women mentioned in boldface above join President Lucy Reed, Vice President Diane Marie Amann, and Executive Council members Janie Chuang and Stephanie Farrior, and Andrea K. Bjorklund as IntLawGrrls in ASIL leadership.

Heartfelt congratulations!

(And a hearty hat tip to Emil Dixon, 3d-year student at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, for designing IntLawGrrls' logo!)

Congratulations to new ASIL officers

In the wake of the hugely successful 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law in Washington, D.C., last week -- overheard, "full of substance, energy and buzz" -- ASIL Exec Director Betsy Andersen and I want to congratulate many, including several IntLawGrrls.
First, the hardworking and creative organizers of the 103rd Annual Meeting, namely:
► Co-chairs Steve Mathias (State Department), Anthea Roberts (London School of Economics), and Carlos Vázquez (Georgetown); and
► Program Committee members, Nehal Bhuta (Toronto), Tomer Broude (Georgetown), Oona Hathaway (California-Berkeley), Derek Jinks (Texas), Rick Johnson (Arnold & Porter), Russ LaMotte (Beveridge & Diamond), Frédéric Mégret (McGill), Andrea Menaker (White & Case), Dianne Otto (Melbourne), Vasuki Nesiah (Brown), Natalie Reid (Debevoise & Plimpton), Sandy Sivakumaran (Nottingham), Paul Stephan (Virginia), Ruth Teitelbaum, Allen Weiner (Stanford), and Gwen K. Young (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).
Second, persons newly elected to ASIL leadership positions, namely:
► President-Elect David Caron (California-Berkeley) (left);
► Honorary President Thomas Franck (New York University);
► Vice Presidents, Diane Marie Amann (California-Davis), our IntLawGrrls founder, Dinah Shelton (George Washington), and Steve Mathias (State Department); and
► Executive Council members Catherine Amirfar (Debevoise & Plimpton), IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Andrea K. Bjorklund (California-Davis), Chris Borgen (St. John's), Olivia Swaak-Goldman (International Criminal Court), Kevin Gray (Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Canada), IntLawGrrls guest/alumna and Opinio Juris blogger Peggy McGuinness (Missouri), Greg Shaffer (Minnesota), and Abby Cohen Smutny (White & Case).
Third, the three persons who'll organize our 104th Annual Meeting, namely:
► The already hardworking and creative Co-Chairs, Russ LaMotte, IntLawGrrl Hari M. Osofsky, and Allen Weiner.
As Society President, I will be making more appointments in coming weeks and months. Details TK.

Human Rights Council

IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Margaret E. McGuinness has a most interesting post on the United States and the U.N. Human Rights Council over at Peggy's home blog, Opinio Juris. Check it out, and keep abreast here of developments at the Council's 10th session, under way now in Geneva, Switzerland.

Bellwether Trials

Peter Spiro and I had the pleasure of hosting IntLawGrrl Elena Baylis (pictured below right) this week at Temple's International Law Colloquium. Elena presented her current work-in-progress, Bellwether Trials: From Mass Torts to Mass Atrocities, on which Peggy McGuinness (pictured below left) commented. Refreshingly short by design, the paper suggests a useful role for internationalized criminal courts from the perspective of one who shares my healthy skepticism of the ability of ad hoc, hybrid and permanent courts to positively impact post-conflict states.

Elena starts from the assumption that the goal of post-conflict justice should be to further the affected society's interests, which often point in directions different from internationalized criminal courts. She notes that the construction of a viable justice system is often a high priority for those who have suffered mass atrocities, and suggests that the most useful role for internationalized criminal courts may be to assist in this project. Many of these ideas are laid out in Elena's forthcoming publication, Reassessing the Role of International Criminal Law: Rebuilding National Courts Through Transnational Networks; the Bellwether Trials piece simply offers a practical role for internationalized criminal courts -- to hold bellwether trials that can assist national courts in trying perpetrators of mass atrocities. While she recognizes that there are due process concerns with this approach, Elena rightfully suggests that these problems exist currently, and her proposal puts us no worse off than where we are today.

Peggy and others suggested that we've already seen internationalized criminal courts play a bellwether role, in Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial. While that idea holds appeal, I remain uncertain about the role of courts in post-conflict justice in less legally oriented societies. Moreover, the discussion brought me back to the fundamental critique expressed so eloquently by Karl Jaspers, that "something other than law is at stake here, and to address it in legal terms is a mistake." Elena's point that these institutions are already here, for better or for worse, and we should make the best use of them we can, is a good one, but it may be that we should be pushing for more radical changes in post-conflict justice. In any case, her pieces provide an engaging and thoughtful guide through the field of post-conflict justice.

Socio-Legal Methods in International Law

Last week, I hosted a Workshop on Socio-Legal Methods in International Law at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. The workshop was intended as a sally into the ongoing debate about the use of empirical methods to assess international law, claiming a place for qualitative methods (interviews, surveys, participant observation, and the like) as empirical research and exploring the contribution of this sort of interdisciplinary work to our understanding of international law in practice.
Building from panels and roundtable discussions sponsored by the International Human Rights Collaborative Research Network at the last two Law and Society Association annual meetings, this workshop brought together legal scholars, legal anthropologists, and others to discuss the role of socio-legal research methodologies and theoretical frameworks in studying international law. Participants included Intlawgrrl Rebecca Bratspies, IntLawGrrls guest bloggers Jenia Turner and Peggy McGuinness (also a cofounder of Opinio Juris blog), and other intlaw and intlaw-studying colleagues. For a full list of the participants and other information about the workshop, see the workshop webpage.
As described by the workshop's theme statement:

... Amongst legal scholars who study international law, attention has recently turned to empirical studies that attempt to demonstrate the real word effects (or lack thereof) of international law. With this increase in empirical work legal scholars are debating the relative efficacy of various quantitative and qualitative methodologies in developing empirical descriptions of international law practice. At the same time, there has been an upsurge in the interest in international law, and particularly in international human rights, amongs legal anthropologists.
Against this backdrop, this workshop will explore the role of socio-legal methodologies in describing and defining the contours of international law. It brings together legal anthropologists, legal scholars, and others studying international law from various disciplinary perspectives to discuss their research international law and their use of various methodologies and theoretical frameworks. The participants include specialists in international human rights law, international criminal law, international environmental law, and other areas. The methodological questions to be addressed are cross-cutting, concerning the role of methodology in shaping our understanding of international law and the challenges international law creates for socio-legal methodologies.

Guest Blogger: Margaret E. McGuinness

It is IntLawGrrls' great honor to welcome as a guest blogger our colleague Margaret E. McGuinness (right), a cofounder and contributor at our sibling blog, Opinio Juris.
Peggy's an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Missouri School of Law in Columbia. Formerly a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. State Department, she served as a Special Assistant to Secretary of State Warren Christopher from 1993-1994. Thereafter she earned her J.D. at Stanford Law School, where she was an articles editor for the Stanford Law Review and a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation. She was a law clerk for U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York, and then practiced law at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in New York before entering academia.
Peggy teaches international law, international human rights, international business transactions, foreign affairs and the constitution, and federal courts. Her publications concern matters as varied as mediation in armed conflict, the status of refugees in conflict zones, and the role of the United Nations in war. Her guest post today focuses on treatment of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations in the case of Medellín v. Texas.

Heartfelt welcome!

Three Narratives of Medellín v. Texas

Much ink has already been spilled about the Medellín v. Texas decision – the subject of my IntLawGrrls guest post – with much more to come. (For a summary of the case and its holding, see my ASIL Insight here.) The first published law review symposium on the case was convened by Professor Valerie Epps for the Suffolk Transnational Law Review and included important contributions from Bill Schabas, Christina Cernas, John Murphy, Jordan Paust, John Cerone and Craig Jackson. I have argued elsewhere that the story of Medellín is one of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) being exploited as a “norm portal” that has permitted transnational advocacy groups to contest American exceptionalism on the death penalty. Building from that work. my own modest contribution to the Suffolk symposium, Three Narratives of Medellin v. Texas, views the case through a wide lens which sees the Supreme Court decision as part of a broader story of international legal process:

Analysis of Medellín is likely to fall into one of the three narratives to have emerged from the arguments of the parties, the briefs of amici, and outside commentary: (1) Internal/Constitutionalist: Draws on the U.S. Constitution as the final word on applicable law and modes of judicial interpretation in the case; (2) External/Internationalist: Looks to the tenets of public international law to identify first order principles for understanding the case and appropriate judicial outcomes; and (3) Transnational/Intersystemic: Seeks to explain Medellín through the phenomenon of multiple, interactive systems of law through which changes in normative behavior occur. While the first two narratives dominated the parties' submissions to the Court and form the space within which much of the academic debate has taken place, it is the third narrative that provides a more complete story of how a death penalty case in Texas came to be litigated before both the ICJ and the Supreme Court.

Medellín represents an excellent case study for process-oriented theories of how international human rights norms move across national borders and between and among local, national and transnational actors and provides important detail about the domestic and international mechanisms that promote norm integration and, significantly, can serve as barriers to norm integration. That this case is fundamentally a result and reflection of U.S. death penalty exceptionalism is broadly recognized by the foreign states that have challenged the U.S. at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), even though they sought to address the death sentences against their nationals through the seemingly neutral procedural device of consular notification. I don’t mean to suggest that the questions of presidential power, federalism, self-execution of treaties and ICJ enforcement powers at the heart of the case (and the Internal/Constitutional and External/Internationalist narratives) are uninteresting or unimportant. Rather, I am arguing that they are merely one part of the story, representing doctrinal spaces in which the underlying question of American exceptionalism to international human rights regulation is being contested.
To illustrate these disparate processes and actors at work, here are two examples from recent press accounts of the case. The first is a May editorial in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times calling on Texas to do the right thing and grant José Medellín (above left) the additional hearing that the ICJ held was required to remedy the breach of the VCCR notification provisions at the time of Medellín's arrest:

Medellín deserves his justice, but the United States has its obligations, too. The obligation is to honor the treaty it agreed to when it signed the 1963 Vienna Convention. That agreement says that when people are arrested abroad, they have a right to have access to consular officials from their own country.
That right protects Americans, too. And perhaps Americans in particular because thousands of Americans travel abroad on vacations, on family trips and on business. Being arrested and detained by foreign police, being put in a foreign jail, under strange laws can be frightening. Americans under arrest have the right to access American consular officials because of treaty obligations. But if the United States ignores those obligations, so can foreign countries.

[snip]

It’s highly doubtful that holding a hearing on the violations would change the outcome of the prosecution. Medellin’s prosecution seems to have followed every required step that state law requires. But ordering a hearing would satisfy the process of the international treaty and more importantly send the message that the United States takes treaty obligations seriously.

To get a flavor for how the issue plays out with the Corpus Christi readership – including how the question of consular reciprocity gets wrapped up with local prerogatives over the death penalty and perceptions of fairness of foreign criminal justice systems – check out the comments section below the editorial. At a minimum, the expressed "local" interest – in this case a community made up of a large active and retired military population, close to an international border – provides evidence for why we ought to be skeptical of rational choice reciprocity analysis of why states obey international law that takes into account only an aggregated or monolithic "national interest."
The second example is from the ICJ’s press release citing to the Mexican Government’s request of last month for interim measures seeking to compel the U.S. to comply – where the Supreme Court declined to do so – with the Avena decision:

Mexico explains that "while the United States may use ‘means of its own choosing’ under paragraph 153 (9) [of the Court’s Judgment], the obligation to provide review and reconsideration is not contingent on a success of any one means. As a result, the United States cannot rest on a single means chosen; it must provide the requisite review and reconsideration and prevent the execution of any Mexican national named in the Judgment unless and until that review and reconsideration is completed and it is determined that no prejudice resulted from the violation". Mexico further asserts that "requests by the Mexican nationals for the review and reconsideration mandated in their cases by the Avena Judgment have repeatedly been denied". It also states that "on 25 March 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States determined in the case of José Ernesto Medellín Rojas . . . that the Judgment itself did not directly require U.S. courts to provide review and reconsideration under domestic law" and that "while expressly recognizing the United States obligation to comply with the Judgment under international law, [it] further held that the means chosen by the President of the United States to comply were unavailable under the U.S. Constitution and indicated alternate means involving legislation by the U.S. Congress or voluntary compliance by the State of Texas". Mexico adds that "it understands the United States obligation under paragraph 153 (9) to extend to taking the steps set forth by the Supreme Court, including legislative action at the federal or state levels or compliance by state courts or the state legislatures".
In its Request for interpretation, Mexico goes on to explain that, since the decision of the Supreme Court was issued, "Texas . . . has scheduled Mr. Medellín for execution on 5 August 2008". It insists that "the actions of Texas, a political subdivision of the United States, engage the international responsibility of the United States" and that "the United States cannot invoke its municipal law as justification for failure to perform its international legal obligation under the Avena Judgment". It also observes that "at least four more Mexican nationals are also in imminent danger of having execution dates set by the State of Texas"

It is in this push and pull of the local, the national and the international that norms of behavior will emerge. Viewed from this perspective, there is no claimed superiority of the national or the international, the doctrinal or political, but an ongoing process through which shifts in human rights behavior may be achieved.

(Cross-posted at Opinio Juris blog)

On December 29, ...

... 1893, Vera Brittain was born at Newcastle-under-Lyme, England. When World War I broke out, she urged her brother and his best friend, with whom she'd fallen in love, to enlist. Even before both were killed in that conflict, Brittain began to turn away from war and toward pacifism. In 1993, she published her memoir of that time, Testament of Youth. She has been an inspiration to IntLawGrrl Elizabeth Hillman.
... 1972 (35 years ago today), a 5-year moratorium that had been placed on executions in Canada ended. In that period support for the death penalty seemed to have increased. By a narrow vote the country abolished capital punishment in 1976. The penalty continues in Canada's neighbor to the south, of course, although abolition by New Jersey just this month (the global consequences of which our Opinio Juris colleague Peggy McGuinness posted here and here) reduced the number of U.S. retentionist jurisdictions to 38 -- 37 states plus the federal government -- though compared with prior years there were fewer executions in 2007. A reporter's even envisioned what a United States without the death penalty would look like.

YouTubing U.N. Human Rights Council

Check out this post on same by our Opinio Juris colleague, Peggy McGuinness.

Taking note

Bits 'n' pieces from the AALS/ASIL conference, "What Is Wrong with the Way We Teach and Write International Law," just opened in Vancouver:
In the morning, calls to imagine international law -- to "reconceive," as Jeremy Waldron put it, "an international ordering as a single embracing legal order," and to "engage again with the natural law tradition" that enables a "clear-headed sense of the important ot positive law as means for human ordering." Why do so? To resist realist and pragmatist counterapproaches. Sanjay Reddy spoke of the imagining of "possible worlds," and Colin Dayan challenged human rights jurists to recognize the complexity -- and treacherous malleability -- of terms like "humanity," as they exercise "legal imagination" and "moral imagination."
In the afternoon, calls to change what's taught in international law. Reminding that more than 1 billion people in the world live on under $1 a day, Edith Brown Weiss urged attention to how poverty affects the world and the world's law. She and Balakrishnan Rajagopal called for greater use of information technology to bridge rich-poor/North-South divides. But Rajagopal told a cautionary tale, making clear that many points in his critique had been made by Onuma Yasuaki 26 years ago.
Capping the day, works in progress. The 3 excellent presentations I heard -- Peggy McGuinness on norm portals, Karen E. Bravo (our own Nanny of the Windward Maroons) on the old trans-Atlantic slave trade and contemporary human trafficking, and Patrick Keenan on globalization in a world where some investors, like China, threaten to break the human rights paradigm -- reflected what's right in our discipline.