Today (this morning), I discuss my work.
I am currently writing a Note for the world-famous Fordham International Law Journal on the question of regional criminal courts. The Fordham ILJ is the most oft-cited student-edited specialty law journal in the world. That's right, the world. We're bigger that U.S. Steel. Yeah, that's the ticket. OK, now I'm exaggerating - a little. The Journal office has like eight computers and is short of copier paper. The ILJ office is known as Jerusalem for cacti. Figuring out who spends time in the office is easy; we look for the Camel's hump. But we really are the most-cited and we are run by the coolest people at the school; that is not an exaggeration.
You've probably heard of the
International Criminal Court. Regional criminals courts have been proposed as the next step in creating an international judiciary. I argue that these courts should be created by the Security Council, and not by the regions themselves. The major theoretical argument is that creations of the Security Council will be more legitimate and more viable because the imprimateur of the Security Council reinforces those qualities of legitimacy and viability. I'd tell you more, but I've got to get back to editing it and it might violate the deal I have with Dreamworks to turn it into a major motion picture called Game of Intergovernmentalism. I'm already working on the sequel, The Neofunctionalists Strike Back.
(To be continued . . .)
Greetings . . .
Today's column of the day (thus far) goes to Christopher Hitchens, who, in Slate,
argues very persuasively why it is wrong to see the attacks on Spain as retaliation for Prime Minister Aznar's support for the Iraq war. I am not a big fan of Hitchens because his orientation is so fanatically anti-religion, but he has a wonderful capacity to make a good argument from time to time.
My take on the Spanish government, though, is that they deserved to lose. It's quite clear that they consciously lied to everyone and tried to pin the attack on ETA/Basque because that was the most politically useful scapegoat. That says something very bad about the willingness of even democratic governments to baldly lie about matters of the highest importance. And I think that's the reason Spaniards dramatically rejected the Popular Party. Mendacity did the PP in, not their Iraq policy. And that's a positive thing, because it should send the message to other leaders that it is best, in matters of national security, to be as honest as possible. Those who support the Iraq War would make a big mistake if they accused Spaniards of appeasement, much as this is the prevailing European policy stance, it is not the correct analysis of the Spanish election in my view.
Hi folks,
From this point forward, I am going to try to update this blog as much as possible. Posts will be a mixture of my own commentary and links to articles I find interesting. I will, of course, continue to post my published letters to the editor.
So I'll start with three articles. Two are related, I think.
The first piece is by Neil J. Kressel, discussing the
dearth of scholarship on Islamic antisemitism. The author talks about the difficulties social scientists face in studying antisemitism in the Muslim world and why those difficulties persist.
The other two are articles by liberal thinkers who supported the Iraq War, which I supported as well. The first is human rights scholar Michael Ignatieff, whose
piece appeared in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday.
The other is by the philosopher Paul Berman, who is probably the most famous liberal thinker behind the Iraq War. Berman's
piece is a month or two old; it is in the current issue of Dissent Magazine. In it,
Berman recounts a conversation with a friend on the left who was part of the anti-war movement, reminding us that Iraq was a fascist state, and that regardless of the deficiencies in George W. Bush's leadership and the follies of past misadventures, the Iraq War is a war worth supporting.
Feel free to post comments on the articles in the comments section.
