Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

One of the questions that has troubled many observers of United States government policy from September 11 onwards is what the “end of the conflict” is supposed to look like in this unconventional war.  It’s one thing to say with regards to a conventional conflict – I don’t know when the end of the conflict […]

At almost the same moment that Human Rights Watch/Harvard Law School Human Rights Clinic released its report, “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” which called for states to establish a treaty that would prohibit the “development, production, and use” of “fully autonomous weapons,” the Pentagon (under Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s signature) issued a DOD Directive, “Autonomy […]

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 […]

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 […]

Water rights are a fairly obscure topic to most lawyers – unless one is in a place like the southwestern United States or northwestern Mexico, in which case water rights are a kind of underlying regulatory structure of many other things, such as patterns of agriculture, urban and suburban development, etc. I can think of […]

Muhammad Ali Samantar served as Defense Minister and later Prime Minister of Somalia, fleeing the country in 1991 and coming to the US in 1997.  He was sued under the Alien Tort Statute and Torture Victims Protection Act under allegations of torture, extrajudicial execution, and illegal detention by government agents claimed to be under his […]

Christopher Sprigman, guest blogging last week on his and Kal Raustiala’s terrific new book, The Knockoff Economy, will be delivering the inaugural Peter Jaszi Distinguished Lecture on Intellectual Property at Washington College of Law, American University – my law school, WCL, and we are honored to have him!  The event is tomorrow, November 1, and […]

A week ago, I posted about a new draft article on SSRN by Steven L. Schwarcz (Duke University Law School) on ways in which scholars talk about the financial system and its regulation.  (The working paper is on SSRN here – “Regulating Shadows: Financial Disintermediation and the Need for a Common Language.”) I noted in […]

The Wall Street Journal today features a quote from Joseph Schumpeter, writing in 1942, on ways in which college education can make a person less psychologically fit and less willing to engage in manual labor, notwithstanding greater employment opportunities in manual trades: The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically […]

The Washington Post has just featured three major consecutive front-page stories on “The Permanent War” – the war on terror (or however one wants to label it), as the US moves from Obama 1 to either an Obama 2 or a Romney administration – and administrations after that. The first, by reporter Greg Miller, is […]

Steven L. Schwarcz (Duke University Law School) has a new article in draft up at SSRN, “Regulating Shadows: Financial Disintermediation and the Need for a Common Language.”  Professor Schwarcz is a preeminent scholar in financial markets and regulation, and produces new and interesting articles at a daunting (daunting, at least if you are me and, […]

The Wall Street Journal reports that an Italian court has convicted six scientists and a government of criminal manslaughter for what the court said was a failure to warn of a 2009 earthquake.  The judge sentenced the seven defendants to six years in prison, pending appeals.  I was aware of this case back when the […]