Military and human rights lawyers weigh in on the legality of the killing of Hamas' Mahmoud Mabhouh. . . .

The rocket that NASA aimed at the Moon last week did not produce the public relations bonanza the agency was hoping for--a cloud of dust visible to amateur earth astronomers...

The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-90) is remembered in the English-speaking world, if at all, primarily as a dramatist and, in particular, as the author of the 1956 play "The Visit," which was staged on Broadway in an amended version and later made into a 1964 film starring Ingrid Bergman…

The neoconservative influence on American foreign policy has not had an enthusiastic response outside the United States...

Two branches of our government are hard at work in the war on terror...

I signed the letter because I believe one can serve as a lawyer outside of government, and then enter government to do important work on that same topic — even advocating the views of an administration that has come to different conclusions. . . .

The Obama administration announced on Tuesday its decision to transfer terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo Bay to an empty state prison in Illinois. . . .

Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent is a big book, enormous in concept and sweep, full of portent for transnational politics in the twenty-first century...

Larry Solum - that's Lawrence B. Solum, John E. Cribbet Professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, Champaign and Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois, to you, thank you very much - one of our leading jurisprudentialists and, I'm pleased to say, a dear friend over several decades, publishes, as part of the well-known Legal Theory Blog, a gradually expanding set of basic concepts in legal theory called the Legal Theory Lexicon...

My Hoover Institution colleague Benjamin Wittes' new TNR online column continues his examination of proposals to amend the Military Commissions Act and related legislation that were passed under the last Congress...

In the Opinio Juris blogfest with John Bellinger last week, guest respondent Eric Posner made some comments about the basic condition of the law of war - is it a bargain between states, enforced by some notion of reciprocity (including reprisal as a means of enforcement), or is it a 'universal' paradigm of human rights attaching to individuals as individuals - rights to be treated as noncombatants, irrespective of what the parties to a conflict actually do...

Below is a bit from the introduction - still in draft and will get rewritten drastically - from my book ms., A Politics, Not a Society: The United Nations, Global Civil Society, and the Legitimacy of the International System After Global Governance...

I see that Hillary Rodham Clinton's 1996 book, It Takes A Village, has been re-released on its 10th anniversary...

The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to Muhamad Yunus for his work with Grameen Bank in microfinance this coming Sunday in Oslo...

I volunteer to teach a class at my daughter's school, the National Cathedral School for Girls, in Washington DC (wikipedia article), on ethics and war, Just and Unjust Wars...

Although this blog is mostly about international public law matters, ethics of war and just war, and, well, idle chit-chat, my teaching as a law professor is actually in the areas of business and international business...

A few days ago former Clinton senior national security staffer Susan Rice (likely headed for an even higher post in a future Democratic administration) was on some NPR talk show discussing the question of intervention in Darfur - military intervention of some kind....

I'd like to offer my heartfelt thanks to the heroic and principled administration of the University of Wisconsin for having given academic respectability to the University of Wisconsin's very own Religious Studies lecturer and 9-11 denier Kevin Barrett…

Following UK Leader of the House of Commons (and former Foreign Minister and Home Minister) Jack Straw's attack on Islamism and the Muslim "blackout" veil two weeks ago (Melanie Phillips' comments here; contra Straw, from the New Statesman, Ziauddin Sardar, here), and more broadly on the bad, bad policy of multiculturalism, UK polls show wide public support for his view, then this article in the Daily Telegraph by Denis MacShane, former Labour MP and foreign office official (thanks NRO): At long last, the debate on Islamism as politics, not Islam as religion, is out in the open…