August 2010 – NYU JILP

A Belated Thought on Wikileaks

August 23, 2010
Cole Rabinowitz
1 Comment

by Graham Dumas (J.D. Candidate 2011)

I am a bit late in writing about the Wikileaks issue, but I would like to propose here a slightly different way of viewing the question through the lens of systems engineering. For a number of reasons, Wikileaks has presented to members of the military a simplified and seemingly less painful way to report violations of IHL, leading to a breakdown in, or rather an excursion from, the process the U.S. Military has been using to report, identify, prosecute, and ultimately prevent violations of military law and the law of armed conflict. To remedy this problem, the military should investigate both the demand and supply sides of the information pipeline, simplify the reporting process, and initiate a campaign to educate servicemen of the internal reporting channels available to them, the need to prevent extraneous leaks to the public, and the penalties for releasing classified information. More after the jump.

The State of China’s Legal Profession

In a report issued this past May, the New York City Bar Association's Council on International Affairs detailed the findings of a December 2009 mission to Beijing, China. The resulting picture is saddening and complex, and raises important questions.

Book Review: Begley’s Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters

This installment in our ongoing series of book reviews takes on Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by lawyer/novelist Louis Begley. Hugh Murtaugh’s complimentary review of Begley’s work intertwines the Dreyfus and the Guantanamo narratives. Both Begley and this reviewer conclude with the same lament from Proust: “As for asking oneself about its value, not one thought of it now . . . . It was no longer shocking. That was all that was required.”

By Hugh K. Murtagh

The story of Guantanamo Bay is not over. President Obama will not be able to shutter the island prison until at least 2011, and then only by moving the remaining detainees to a stateside facility. Time passes, details emerge: the “Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures” find their way onto the internet; a military judge will not allow the prosecution of a terrorist leader because he has been so badly abused; Sami al-Hajj, the al-Jazeera journalist held for years on changing unsubstantiated charges, is finally released to Sudan, with his diaries.

Cohen on Human Rights in China

August 5, 2010
Cole Rabinowitz
1 Comment

On Saturday, the New York Times published an interview with NYU Professor Jerome A. Cohen regarding legal developments in China and the country's human rights record. From the interview: “There are now some 200,000 judges, close to 180,000 prosecutors, roughly…

Koskenniemi the scholar vs. Koskenniemi the commissioner

Sahib Singh of the University of Vienna has posted a paper on SSRN titled The Ethics of Fragmentation: Formalism’s Fallacies and the Potential of International Law. The paper is interesting not least because it takes a serious and critical work at the fragmentation report of 2006, prepared for the International Law Commission by Martti Koskenniemi. Singh’s paper investigates the work of a first-rate scholar closely affiliated with NYU Law’s Hauser Global Law School program, and for that alone it would be worth reading for NYU international law students. But Singh’s paper is fascinating because it investigates the tension between Koskenniemi’s personal work and the report. Abstract after the jump.