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Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

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In this section: Congress Enacts Sanctions Legislation Targeting Russia • United States and Qatar Sign Memorandum of Understanding over Terrorism Financing • Trump Reverses Certain Steps Toward Normalizing Relations with Cuba • United States Announces Plans to Withdraw from Paris Agreement on Climate Change • President Trump Issues Trade-Related Executive Orders and Memoranda • United States, Russia, and Jordan Sign Limited Ceasefire for Syria • Trump Administration Recertifies Iranian Compliance with JCPOA Notwithstanding Increasing Concern with Iranian Behavior

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

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In this section: • U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Law Facilitating Compensation for Victims of Iranian Terrorism • Russia Argues Enhanced Military Presence in Europe Violates NATO-Russia Agreement; United States Criticizes Russian Military Maneuvers over the Baltic Sea as Inconsistent with Bilateral Treaty Governing Incidents at Sea • U.S. Secretary of State Determines ISIL Is Responsible for Genocide • United States Blocks Reappointment of WTO Appellate Body Member • U.S. Department of Defense Releases Report of Investigation Finding That October 2015 Air Strike on Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, Was Not a War Crime • United States Expands Air …

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

Articles

In this section: United States Objects to Russia’s Continued Violations of Ukraine’s Territorial Sovereignty, Including by Convoys Purporting to Provide Humanitarian Aid • United States and Afghanistan Sign Bilateral Security Agreement • United States Announces “Changes and Confirmations” in Its Interpretation of the UNConvention Against Torture • United States and China Make Joint Announcement to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Bolstering Multilateral Climate Change Negotiations • United States Deepens Its Engagement with ISIL Conflict • NATO Affirms that Cyber Attacks May Trigger Collective Defense Obligations

Defensive Force Against Non-State Actors: The State Of Play, Monica Hakimi

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This article assesses the implications of the current Syria situation for the international law on the use of defensive force against non-State actors. The law in this area is highly unsettled, with multiple legal positions in play. After mapping the legal terrain, the article shows that the Syria situation accentuates three preexisting trends. First, the claim that international law absolutely prohibits the use of defensive force against non-State actors is increasingly difficult to sustain. States, on the whole, have supported the operation against the so-called Islamic State in Syria. Second, States still have not coalesced around a legal standard on …

A Functional Approach To Targeting And Detention, Monica Hakimi

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The international law governing when states may target to kill or preventively detain nonstate actors is in disarray. This Article puts much of the blame on the method that international law uses to answer that question. The method establishes different standards in four regulatory domains: (1) law enforcement, (2) emergency, (3) armed conflict for civilians, and (4) armed conflict for combatants. Because the legal standards vary, so too may substantive outcomes; decisionmakers must select the correct domain before determining whether targeting or detention is lawful. This Article argues that the "domain method" is practically unworkable and theoretically dubious. Practically, the …

Immigration And National Security: The Illusion Of Safety Through Local Law Enforcement Action, David A. Harris

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Despite efforts to reform immigration law in the 1980s and the 1990s, the new laws passed in those decades by the Congress did not solve the long-term problems raised by undocumented people entering the United States. The issue arose anew after the terrorist attacks of September, 2001. While the advocates for immigration crackdowns in the 1980s and 1990s had cast the issue as one of economics and cultural transformation, immigration opponents after 9/11 painted a different picture: illegal immigration, they said, was a national security issue. If poor farmers from Mexico and Central America could sneak into the U.S. across …

On The Contemporary Meaning Of Korematsu: 'Liberty Lies In The Hearts Of Men And Women', David A. Harris

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In just a few years, seven decades will have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Korematsu v. U.S., one of the most reviled of all of the Court’s cases. Despised or not, however, similarities between the World War II era and our own have people looking at Korematsu in a new light. When the Court decided Korematsu in 1944, we were at war with the Japanese empire, and with this came considerable suspicion of anyone who shared the ethnicity of our foreign enemies. Since 2001, we have faced another external threat – from the al Queda terrorists – …

Law Enforcement And Intelligence Gathering In Muslim And Immigrant Communities After 9/11, David A. Harris

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Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, law enforcement agencies have actively sought partnerships with Muslim communities in the U.S. Consistent with community-based policing, these partnerships are designed to persuade members of these communities to share information about possible extremist activity. These cooperative efforts have borne fruit, resulting in important anti-terrorism prosecutions. But during the past several years, law enforcement has begun to use another tactic simultaneously: the FBI and some police departments have placed informants in mosques and other religious institutions to gather intelligence. The government justifies this by asserting that it must take a pro-active stance in order …

International Standards For Detaining Terrorism Suspects: Moving Beyond The Armed Conflict-Criminal Divide, Monica Hakimi

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Although sometimes described as war, the fight against transnational jihadi groups (referred to for shorthand as the "fight against terrorism") largely takes place away from any recognizable battlefield. Terrorism suspects are captured in houses, on street corners, and at border crossings around the globe. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the high-level Qaeda operative who planned the September 11 attacks, was captured by the Pakistani government in a residence in Pakistan. Abu Omar, a radical Muslim imam, was apparently abducted by U.S. and Italian agents off the streets of Milan. And Abu Baker Bashir, the spiritual leader of the Qaeda-affiliated group responsible for …

International Standards For Detaining Terrorism Suspects: Moving Beyond The Armed Conflict-Criminal Divide, Monica Hakimi

Articles

Although sometimes described as war, the fight against transnational jihadi groups (referred to for shorthand as the "fight against terrorism") largely takes place away from any recognizable battlefield. Terrorism suspects are captured in houses, on street comers, and at border crossings around the globe. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the high-level Qaeda operative who planned the September 11 attacks, was captured by the Pakistani government in a residence in Pakistan. Abu Omar, a radical Muslim imam, was apparently abducted by U.S. and Italian agents off the streets of Milan. And Abu Baker Bashir, the spiritual leader of the Qaeda-affiliated group responsible for …

The Immigration-Terrorism Illusory Correlation And Heuristic Mistake, Mary De Ming Fan

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The national broil over immigration reform is fermenting an illusory correlation and mistaken heuristic. Two events illustrate the involvement of legislators in the manufacture and mplification of this heuristic mistake. A controversial bill passed by the House of Representatives in December 2005 explicitly and extensively packaged immigration control with antiterrorism.' During his term as a congressman, J. D. Hayworth published a book claiming that inflows of people over the U.S.-Mexico border pose a "terrorist threat," that the nation has witnessed an "illegal alien crime spree," and that high immigration rates from Mexico threaten social instability.[para] Such pronouncements by legislators generate …

Sending The Bureaucracy To War, Elena Baylis, David Zaring

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Administrative law has been transformed after 9/11, much to its detriment. Since then, the government has mobilized almost every part of the civil bureaucracy to fight terrorism, including agencies that have no obvious expertise in that task. The vast majority of these bureaucratic initiatives suffer from predictable, persistent, and probably intractable problems - problems that contemporary legal scholars tend to ignore, even though they are central to the work of the writers who created and framed the discipline of administrative law.

We analyze these problems through a survey of four administrative initiatives that exemplify the project of sending bureaucrats to …

The Fourth Amendment And Terrorism, John Burkoff

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The important questions we need to ask and to answer B in the perilous times in which we live B is whether the Fourth Amendment applies in the same fashion not just to run of the mill criminals, but also to terrorists and suspected terrorists, individuals who are committing or who have committed B or who may be poised to commit B acts aimed at the destruction of extremely large numbers of people? Professor Burkoff argues that we can protect ourselves from cataclysmic threats of this sort and still maintain a fair and objective application of Fourth Amendment doctrine that …

Re-Membering Law In The Internationalizing World, Vivian Grosswald Curran

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This article examines some of the challenges to understanding new, non-national legal configurations as contexts of origin color understandings and evaluations of legal standards allegedly shared across legal communities. It examines a case on assisted suicide, Pretty v. U.K., decided by the European Court of Human Rights. The case illustrates mechanisms of legal integration in the European court, followed by a process of dis-integration that occurred when the decision was reported to the French legal community. The French rendition reflected a legal community's inability to process common law information through civil law cognitive grids. The article addresses both the capacity …

'A Flame Of Fire': The Fourth Amendment In Perilous Times, John Burkoff

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The important questions we need to ask and to answer in the perilous times in which we live is whether the Fourth Amendment applies in the same fashion not just to run of the mill criminals, but also to terrorists and suspected terrorists, individuals who are committing or who have committed B or who may be poised to commit B acts aimed at the destruction of extremely large numbers of people? Professor Burkoff argues that we can protect ourselves from cataclysmic threats of this sort and still maintain a fair and objective application of Fourth Amendment doctrine that respects our …

Romantic Common Law, Enlightened Civil Law: Legal Uniformity And The Homogenization Of The European Union, Vivian Grosswald Curran

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The main thrust of this article is to suggest how legal uniformity may result in the European Union despite its Member States' encompassing the two highly distinct legal traditions of the common law and the civil law. My theory is that the defining characteristics of the civil-law legal culture, although in stark and profound contrast with those of the common-law legal system, nevertheless appear prominently and pervasively in the non-legal spheres of common-law nations; and vice versa, such that common-law legal characteristics correspond closely to elements often excluded from civil-law legal cultures, but which are included in the non-legal domains …

Harboring Conspiracy, Henry W. Rogers

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That the American people should naturally sympathize with Ireland in its demand for home rule is to be expected from the very nature of our institutions and theory of government. We in this country are of the opinion that Ireland, in demanding from England the right to regulate its domestic affairs in its own way and by its own laws, presents an honorable and a just cause, which appeals to our sympathy and sense of right. But it makes no difference bow honorable and legitimate a cause may be in itself, if it be supported by means which are not …