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Full-Text Articles in Law
Human Rights Thinking And The Laws Of War, David Luban
Human Rights Thinking And The Laws Of War, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In a significant early case, the ICTY commented: “The essence of the whole corpus of international humanitarian law as well as human rights law lies in the protection of the human dignity of every person…. The general principle of respect for human dignity is . . . the very raison d'être of international humanitarian law and human rights law.”
Is it true that international humanitarian law and international human rights law share the same “essence,” and that essence is the general principle of respect for human dignity? Is it true that, in the words of Charles Beitz, humanitarian law is …
Humanitarian Intervention: Evolving Norms, Fragmenting Consensus (Remarks), Rosa Brooks
Humanitarian Intervention: Evolving Norms, Fragmenting Consensus (Remarks), Rosa Brooks
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Traditionally, the evolution of customary international law was understood as a gradual process: in some idealized model, we might see first a few states, and then a few more, implicitly agreeing to follow a practice, and then we would gradually begin to see additional states doing the same thing. We would also gradually accumulate evidence that these various states are acting in such a way because they consider themselves legally bound to do so. Then, over time, we’ll see more and more states following suit both in word and deed, until at some point we can say with a great …
Lessons For International Law From The Arab Spring, Rosa Brooks
Lessons For International Law From The Arab Spring, Rosa Brooks
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Not all that begins in hope ends in happiness. In Egypt, the exuberance of Tahrir Square has given way to frustration over the resilience of the security state; in Libya, the anti-Qaddafi movement has fractured along tribal and factional lines; in Syria, as of this writing, calls for reform continue to be met with gunfire from government forces. Throughout the Middle East—from Egypt, Libya and Syria to Yemen, Tunisia, Bahrain and elsewhere—the heady excitement of 2010 has given way to a more sober awareness that enduring political change may take years, if not generations. The Arab Spring brought both progress …
Libya: A Multilateral Constitutional Moment?, Catherine Powell
Libya: A Multilateral Constitutional Moment?, Catherine Powell
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The Libya intervention of 2011 marked the first time that the UN Security Council invoked the “responsibility to protect” principle (RtoP) to authorize use of force by UN member states. In this comment the author argues that the Security Council’s invocation of RtoP in the midst of the Libyan crisis significantly deepens the broader, ongoing transformation in the international law system’s approach to sovereignty and civilian protection. This transformation away from the traditional Westphalian notion of sovereignty has been unfolding for decades, but the Libyan case represents a further normative shift from sovereignty as a right to sovereignty as a …
Rights Over Borders: Transnational Constitutionalism And Guantanamo Bay, David Cole
Rights Over Borders: Transnational Constitutionalism And Guantanamo Bay, David Cole
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay argues that the most profound implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush may lie not in what it says about the place of law in the war on terror, but in what it reflects about the Supreme Court’s altered conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality, and rights in the globalized world.
Boumediene was groundbreaking in at least three respects. For the first time in its history, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law enacted by Congress and signed by the president on an issue of military policy in a time of armed conflict. Also for the first …
Failed States, Or The State As Failure?, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks
Failed States, Or The State As Failure?, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This article seeks to challenge a basic assumption of international law and policy, arguing that the existing state-based international legal framework stands in the way of developing effective responses to state failure. It offers an alternative theoretical framework designed to spark debate about better legal and policy responses to failed states. Although the article uses failed states as a lens to focus its arguments, it also has broad implications for how we think about sovereignty, the evolving global order, and the place of states within it.
State failure causes a wide range of humanitarian, legal, and security problems. Unsurprisingly, given …