I will be in Israel for the next week, so blogging may be light during that time. I am going to present a paper on democracy and international human rights law coauthored with Northwestern University lawprof John McGinnis at the Minerva Center conference on international human rights law at Hebrew University. Our paper builds on our earlier Stanford Law Review article, which argued against allowing many types of international law to override the domestic law of democratic states. In the new paper, which I hope to post on SSRN within a few weeks, we apply our argument to the specific case of international human rights law. If you are a VC reader and happen to be at the conference, drop by and say hello.

In addition to attending the conference, I will also get a chance to see a little bit of how Israel has changed in the 25 years since I was last there, and also to visit with various Israeli family members (mostly distant relatives from Russia who emigrated to Israel many years ago), some of whom I have never even met. It should be an interesting time all round.

If time permits and I gather enough interesting observations to make it worthwhile, I may blog about the comparative situation of Russian immigrants in the US, Israel, and Germany (where I was a visiting professor 3 years ago, and also have relatives who migrated there from Russia).