If you happen to be around Charlottesville tomorrow, Friday, February 10, you might want to come over to a symposium on how to resolve conflicting legal norms in US and foreign courts: The conference – organized by the student-run Virginia Journal of International Law and the John Bassett Moore Society of International Law – […]
Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson
The Alien Tort Statute Returns to the Supreme Court: International Law versus Law of the Hegemon?
As I have occasionally noted here at VC, this term the Supreme Court will hear an Alien Tort Statute case, the Kiobel case, in which a primary question is whether the ATS embraces a theory of corporate liability. The Supreme Court presumably took the case because of a circuit split that has arisen over the […]
The CIA Digs In
The Washington Post has an excellent front page story by Greg Miller today, “CIA digs in as Americans withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan.” The title largely sums up the story. As uniformed military forces depart each of those theatres, the CIA will remain behind. To do what? The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in […]
How Do I Drone Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
(Note: I think the link is fixed now. Thanks for the alert.) Excellent feature article in New Scientist on the many, many ways in which drones are being used today in different places and functions around the world. They include flying grids over Brazilian fields to see which ones need to be re-sown, in France […]
Defending the Humanities, or, Sisyphus
These days the defense of the products and output of the humanities – literature, criticism, the academic study of the arts and letters, etc. – is not an easy task. At least it is not an easy task if one’s position is doubly, or even triply-conditioned: First, a defense would have to be of critical […]
Farewell to the Revista de Libros de la Fundacion Caja Madrid
With sadness I report the closure of one of the world’s great stand-alone book reviews, the Revista de Libros de la Fundacion Caja Madrid. For the past twenty years, it has served as the leading literary review in the Spanish-speaking world – edited in Spain, and possessed of a genuinely global grasp of intellectual and […]
Professor Bobbitt Weds
Philip Bobbitt is an old and dear friend, and I was privileged to meet his bride, the marvelous Maya Ondalikoglu, at a dinner in California last month. This Above the Law story on the romance and wedding is not a gossip piece. Professor Bobbitt agreed to be interviewed for the story, and it’s a quite lovely […]
Guatemala’s Lost Civil War Photographs at the NYT Lens Blog
I’ve been light on blogging for the past while, due to a relentless travel schedule and still-more relentless editors on several projects. However, I did not want to let the day go by without congratulating my Beloved Wife, Jean-Marie Simon, for the online exhibition and commentary in the New York Times Lens photography blog today. […]
The Legal Whiteboard: Hello World
Welcome to the blogging world, Bill Henderson and Andy Morriss and their new blog, The Legal Whiteboard. It promises to fill an important missing link in the discussion of the future business models of the legal profession and legal education. From the inaugural post by Bill Henderson: According to a lot of reputable media […]
Anxiety Is Not a Policy for Drones and Targeted Killing
A current meme on drones and targeted killing is that although they might indeed reduce civilian harm and offer greater protection to one’s own force – more precision and discriminating use of force – they are nonetheless bad because they have another effect, viz., that they reduce the inhibition that political or military leaders have […]
Padilla Appeal Dismissed by Fourth Circuit
Although the big news today is the Supreme Court opinion in Jones, we also have the Fourth Circuit dismissing the Padilla appeal in a Bivens claim. Lawfare’s Steve Vladeck explains and comments: Jack [Goldsmith] just flagged the Fourth Circuit’s unanimous 39-page opinion throwing out Lebron v. Rumsfeld–one of the two pending Bivens suits brought by […]
“Words Are a Scarce Resource” … Is This a Methodology Leading to These Conclusions?
Andres Marroquin, a Guatemalan economics blogger I follow with interest, has a new draft paper (co-authored with Julio Cole), “Economical Writing (Or, Think Hemingway).” It is summarized at Marroquin’s blog post, The Economics of Writing. Literature [Nobel] laureates tend to use shorter words than laureates in other disciplines, and the difference is statistically significant. These […]
Ryan Calo on Regulatory Gaps and Robotics
Ryan Calo, director for robotics at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, has a new, op-ed length essay on the ways in which robots fall in-between regulatory stools as they move from specialized factory or military functions into everyday life. Who Will Regulate Robots? Students of this transformative technology should keep their eye […]
Why Study Law and Economics? And Is the JD Really the Doctor of Social Engineering?
Tomorrow is the first class in my 1L elective class in Law and Economics. The 1Ls at my school are allowed one spring elective course, and can choose among an array of courses for 1Ls [edited: at the post bottom, I’ve put the full list in case anyone is interested]. Law and Economics is popular, […]
Do Bloggers Dream of … 2012 Version
(Note: I opened this for comments, not sure why only one is showing – I’ll ask the experts.) A late Happy New Year to the Volokh Conspiracy and all its readers. I’d like to thank Eugene for the opportunity he extended me a couple of years to join his merry band; I’ve found it stimulating […]