Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

At The New Yorker blog, a very good discussion of the legal issues in the OBL attack. As Khatchadourian notes: What was true in Iraq and in the Second World War also applies in the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Targeted air strikes are status-based operations. The drone strikes are status-based operations. Raids conducted […]

Politico reports that two UN special rapporteurs – one on extrajudicial execution, and the other on counterterrorism and human rights – are calling on the US to release information to the United Nations to justify its killing of OBL.  In a break with the administration’s policy of engagement with the UN, it seems to have […]

Bow and scrape, O lesser mortals, for I am about to ascend to the heights of the blogosphere, where I shall be an Instapundit guest-blogger this upcoming week while Glenn Reynolds is on vacation.  I have been given a new, sacred Aztec name, Tlaloc, He Who Walks Behind The Links.  (But I’ll continue to be […]

I wonder whether the current kerfuffle over whether there was a legal obligation to invite OBL to surrender would be different had the Obama administration, and John Brennan in particular, not inexplicably displayed a certain hesitation on the question of capture. Suppose that faced with that initial, and entirely predictable, question – did the SEALs […]

James Tierney, an outgoing editor at the University of Chicago Law Review, has been doing a series of guest posts at Opinio Juris on the topic of the law review selection process.  Being an international law blog, some of the focus is on international law, but most of the posts are about the submission/selection process […]

The article in Der Spiegel today that Co-Conspirator David Bernstein criticizes below has received a lot of deserved pushback.  My feeling overall about this kind of analysis – as well as Mary Ellen O’Connell’s analysis and my own and that of others – is that what we call international law has been fragmenting for some […]

This is a question for knowledgeable law professors, administrators, students, or others who are well informed.  I had never heard this term until reading the comments to the grading and scholarship posts below.  I don’t teach 1Ls, except for a specialized introduction to law and economics elective, but I had never heard of such a […]

I apologize for the self-serving step of linking to my own pieces on targeted killing and drone warfare, but I’ve been fielding a number of calls and emails today from press on these issues.  I’m about to get in a car and drive to UVA, so I thought the most helpful thing I could do […]

Financial journalist Roger Lowenstein has a nice essay in today’s New York Times opinion section on the Fed or, more exactly, calls for its abolition.  Be careful what you wish for, he says.  Regardless of one’s take on the existence of the Fed, or its policies, or Ben Bernanke, or anything else, the essay offers […]

Brutally fine article in the New York Times business section today on merit scholarships used at law schools to entice 1Ls.  The 1ls receive scholarships to persuade them to come, and goose the schools’ LSAT and GPA rankings for US News and Report purposes – but then wind up losing the scholarship at the end […]

One of the issues raised by drone technology and targeted killing is whether there is something like a “legal geography of war.”  Meaning, where and when does the law of war apply, and where and when is it just the Law of Ordinary Life?  Since the development of the airplane in war, the boundaries of […]

In comments to my post below about the strange new respect for drones (cross-posted at Opinio Juris, and in the comments there), my OJ colleague Kevin Jon Heller says that I’m arguing a strawman.  The “circles” that he and I both move in – academics, NGO activists, and so one – he suggests, have never […]

From the Department of Strange New Respect.  Numbers of folks I’ve been talking with recently – desirous of going forward with humanitarian intervention in Libya, but mindful that international altruism by the Western democracies goes forward only with few casualties among their armies – seem suddenly to have concluded that drones are a wonderfully discriminating […]

I hadn’t thought to say anything about the King and Spalding withdrawal of representation on DOMA, although I agree broadly with what other Conspirators have said.  Just for the record, though, I am one of the signers on the Ben Wittes letter in defense of the Guantanamo lawyers, and seeing that this comparison has become […]

Fine long article in the Washington Post today by Peter Finn and Anne E. Kornblut on why President Obama has not fulfilled his promise to close Guantanamo Bay.  Detailed, measured, and comprehensive, with an excellent timeline graphic.  I agree with Ben Wittes’ take that the best bit of reporting detail is this: On Obama’s inauguration […]