In which I wish I’d gone to law school

Over at Wronging Rights, Kate and Amanda are puzzling over a recent TIME article that states the International Criminal Court is “compiling evidence of possible recent war crimes in southern Sudan, allegedly directed by Sudanese Defense Minister Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein.”

This article—which name-drops George Clooney, weirdly enough—raises all sorts of questions. Kate and Amanda, who are Actually Lawyers, ask (and attempt to answer, somewhat) these questions far better than I can, given that I have but a single international human rights law class under my belt. That said, as I understand it, the ICC can’t just open investigations willy-nilly.

The ICC can only open a case if it: 1) is referred to them either by a state involved in the case (as in Uganda) or by the Security Council (as in Darfur, Sudan in 2005 and Libya); or 2) involves alleged crimes under the ICC’s jurisdiction, defined as crimes in which “the accused is a national of a State Party or a State otherwise accepting the jurisdiction of the Court” or crimes that “took place on the territory of a State Party or a State otherwise accepting the jurisdiction of the Court.”

The problem here is that neither Sudan nor the newly formed South Sudan is a state party to the ICC, meaning the only way this case makes sense is if the Security Council referred it, which it didn’t. Kate and Amanda ask:

So, uh, what gives? Did the TIME reporter get an Enough Project report and mistakenly conclude it was an internal ICC memo? Or is there some other reason why the ICC, a court of limited jurisdiction and limited resources, would be spending the latter on an investigation that is clearly outside of the former?

This is, to me, where things get sort of crazy. Kate and Amanda asked law professor Kevin Jon Heller to weigh in, which he did:

My best guess is — as they suggest — that the OTP has received assurances from the new South Sudanese government that it will either (1) ratify the Rome Statute and accept the Court’s jurisdiction retroactively, or (2) file a declaration under Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute accepting jurisdiction on an hoc basis over the crimes the OTP is investigating. Either way, the issue would be how far back in time South Sudan could accept the Court’s jurisdiction.

He goes on to suggest a weirder (to me—speak up, international human rights lawyers, if you have something even weirder to add!) possibility:

South Sudan could invoke the Eichmann “precedent” and argue that a state should have the right to give the Court retroactive jurisdiction over any and all crimes committed against its citizens, even if the state did not formally exist at the time of their commission.

Amanda responds with a pretty fascinating discussion of the difference between passive personality jurisdiction and active personality jurisdiction that I won’t attempt to recap here but that seems to indicate that the Eichmann precedent won’t actually get the ICC very far.

I’ve written before about my love-hate relationship with the ICC that’s mostly hate, and this latest apparently overreaching on the part of Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo feels like yet another misstep in a series of horrible missteps. That said, the pretend law geek inside of me is fascinated by it, and I’m looking forward to seeing if and how the ICC can justify this investigation as being under their jurisdiction.

Eschaton and English 102

I’m applying myself to Infinite Jest this fall, though not as diligently as some—I haven’t, for example, ripped my book in half and reconstructed two individual tomes complete with footnotes, and I didn’t start using multiple bookmarks until today, 336 pages in.

As everyone who’s ever written anything about Infinite Jest will apparently tell you, lots of people think of it as a doorstop, a brick of a novel. I happen to like these kinds of books, so it’s working for me.

But: this post is not actually about Infinite Jest. Instead, it’s (and only weakly—welcome to the first of my Iron Blogger contributions!) about David Foster Wallace’s syllabi, which are not at all brick-like, nor do they require multiple bookmarks to read.

Katie Roiphe writes in Slate:

One of the reasons I find his syllabi so fascinating is that they are not polished pieces of writing. They are relatively devoid of his stylistic rococo, and while obviously not devoid of his astonishing level of self-consciousness, do provide some slight glimpse into the person, without the baffling ingenious mediation of his art.

After spending the last few weeks elbow-deep in tennis and the rules of Eschaton (more on that below), DFW’s syllabi, which are available through the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, are a treat. See:

I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student’s in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is.

Finally, as promised:

#TEDxC: Session 4, Beyond

Quotes from the last session of TEDxCambridge:

Nate Ball, beatboxer: “I want to know what moves you and what you have to let go of to keep moving.”

Scott Summit, prosthetic limb designer: “Our goal is to be unapologetically man-made.”

Dylan Polin and Dustin Bryant, freerunners: “When we see a wall, we don’t see an obstruction.”

George Church, geneticist: “We can identify a single human neuron that responds to Jennifer Aniston and not to other faces.”

Joshua Walters, bipolar comedian: “I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness.”

Jeff Lieberman, polymath: “I’m a community of 50 trillion cells doing a magic dance.”

John Pak, advocate for disabled individuals: “I can teach you to use sound to navigate everything around you.”

Rachel Klein, Dave Sawyer, and Zach Ward, improv artists: “Whatever happens is meant to happen.” // “So you’ve got a $30k piece of equipment inside you, and it can only fax?” “Yeah.” “I bet Medicare paid for it.” // “Um. I saw that wall as…a wall.”

#TEDxC: Session 3, We

Bits and pieces from the third session of TEDxCambridge:

tedxc_1 tedxc_2 tedxc_3

tedxc_4 tedxc_5 tedxc_6

tedxc_7 tedxc_8

  1. Michael Norton wants us to be more altruistic.
  2. Nadeem Mazen bridges the gap between imagination and creation.
  3. Sandy Pentland works to usher in a “new deal of data.”
  4. Jesus Gerena works to bring families out of poverty.
  5. Richard Wilkinson argues that economic inequality harms societies.
  6. Amitabh Chandra advocates for health care spending reform.
  7. Greg Epstein questions Robert Putnam’s assertion that religious people are better neighbors; claims community, rather than a specific religion, makes us better people.
  8. Iyeoka Okoawo has us make music together.