Archive | November, 2012

Last month at the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa annual conference, I discussed a paper I am writing with a former student, Dana Brusca: how one determines whether a violation of Art. 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention has occurred, and what the remedy is. (My talk begins at approx. […]

Courtesy of Larry Downes and the (indispensable) WCITLeaks.org document repository, some evidence that the UN is gearing up for a public relations push in support of what Downes is (rightly) calling the “Anti-Internet Treaty” — viz., various proposals on the table  at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications which would give the UN’s  International […]

The Green Bag has just announced a Call for Papers for its first micro-symposium, to be published in its Winter 2013 issue, which will feature responses to my already-canonical article, A Theory of Law. Submissions are due December 25, 2012.

A lot of Facebook users have recently posted legal notices on their Facebook walls in an attempt to establish legal rights in what they post on Facebook using copyright and privacy laws. For a discussion of why these notices don’t do what their posters think, see the helpful write-up at Snopes.com.

Human Rights Watch has released a new report (co-authored by the Harvard Law School Human Rights Clinic) on autonomous weapons systems that might emerge over the next several decades, titled “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots.”  The report calls for a multilateral treaty that would preemptively ban “development, production, and use” of fully autonomous weapons by […]

Stewart Baker’s provocative post on the TSA prompts the question of what screening policies our readers would have the TSA adopt if our readers could determine the TSA’s air travel security policy. Here’s a reader poll on that issue, with my apologies for the strange formatting. If you could determine the TSA’s policies, what security […]

The lead story on the front page of Monday’s New York Times features an article on how courts and legislatures have divided on the law of cell phone privacy. Unfortunately, the story rather confusingly switches back and forth between considering at least three different legal questions: 1) What privacy protections the Fourth Amendment or statutes […]

According to the AFP, the UN is seeking surveillance drones to monitor the DR Congo-Rwanda conflict – the UN hopes that the United States or France, or perhaps other countries, will make them available: UN officials stress that there could be no speedy deployment of drones in DR Congo as MONUSCO would need equipment and training. But […]

here.  A few brief excerpts: In Why Tolerate Religion? Brian Leiter, author of theLeiter Reports blog and a law professor at the University of Chicago who has an interest in philosophy, asks why Western democracies have sought to promote and protect religion—and religious liberty—in both law and culture. *** What to make of this? Leiter’s argument suffers from […]

I am pleased to report that my most recent article, A Theory of Law, has been published in The Green Bag. I would normally post an abstract along with the link to the full text, but this article is difficult to condense. On the bright side, it is less than one page long. And unlike […]

“I … watch him working at the stove.  His easy concentration, economical movements, setting up in me a procession of sparks and chills.” — Alice Munro, Dear Life Three pages after this passage, Alice Munro’s virginal young narrator goes to bed with the man at the stove. That will come as no surprise to most […]