My Courses

I've gotten asked about my classes a few times, so I thought I'd give a rundown. Here they are:

International Legal Institutions (Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:00am - 10:30am)
Professor Alison Duxbury, University of Melbourne

A course on the law of international organizations. We focus on the United Nations, going through its different organs (General Assembly, Security Council, Secretariat, etc.) and what their legal powers and responsibilities are, proposals for reform, and so on. We also will be spending a fair amount of time on various international judicial institutions like the International Court of Justice (established by the UN Charter), the International Criminal Court, and various war crimes tribunals. Then we go into regional institutions like ASEAN and the African Union. Toward the end of course we'll talk about specialized institutions like the WTO, as well as non-governmental organizations.

I like this course a lot, aside from it being so early in the morning. My foreign policy perspective is very oriented toward strengthening the effectiveness of institutions like the UN and the ICC, so this is important stuff to learn about. And the professor is great.

International Humanitarian Law (Mondays, 3:10pm - 5:00pm)
Professor Alison Duxbury, University of Melbourne; Professor Klaus Hoffman-Holland, Free University Berlin

Humanitarian law, basically, is the law of war. But it's limited to what's called jus in bello, which is the "law in war" as opposed to jus ad bellum, which is the "law to war" (some are pushing to change the latter term to jus contra bellum, or the "law against war" to emphasize the illegality of the use of force). In other words, it doesn't deal with whether the war being waged is just, or which side is right. Instead, it deals with the rules of war once a war has already begun. So this deals mainly with the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions, which regulate things like the treatment of detained combatants and the protection of civilians and cultural property. We'll also be talking about the laws of occupation, the means and methods of warfare (stuff like arms control), and methods of enforcing humanitarian law.

We have to write a paper for this course, which we just chose topics for. My topic is the Palestinian Authority's recent decision to recognize the authority of the ICC in an effort to get the prosecutor to press charges against Israel for alleged war crimes. Basically it will be about whether the ICC can have jurisdiction over Gaza even though Israel is not a party to the ICC and Palestine isn't a state, and if it does have jurisdiction, whether a case can be made out against Israel for war crimes.

This is probably my favorite class.

Comparative Approaches to Human Rights & National Security (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30pm - 2:00pm)
Professor David Cole, Georgetown University; Professor Colm O'Cinneide, Kings College London

This course compares the national security approaches of the United States and the United Kingdom. Neither has a particularly stellar approach. The course goes through four basic areas of national security policy: detention, interrogation, terror financing, and surveillance. Then at the end it talks about the role of courts in times of emergency and/or terrorist threat. So obviously there are a lot of hot-button issues covered here, including Guantanamo, torture, and wiretapping. The professors clearly enjoy engaging with these kinds of controversies, and so do I, so it's a pretty fun course.

Transnational Legal Theory (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30am - 11:55am)
Professor Alon Harel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This is a required course for all students at CTLS, which is unfortunate, because it's a really crappy course. It doesn't have to be - it deals with a lot of really interesting issues: theories of globalization, limits on sovereignty, humanitarian intervention, universal jurisdiction, etc. (Okay, those things are "really interesting" if you're an international lawyer, I promise.) But the readings are so incredibly abstract and dense that they suck all the fun out of the issues. They are also the sort of reading that are difficult for even a native English speaker, which means they're next to impossible for the non-native speakers in the program. And the professor, who is a really nice and interesting guy, does not have a background in international law. He teaches domestic legal theory, which is fine, but that tends not to translate directly to international legal theory, which deals with a whole different set of issues.

Faculty Colloquium (every other Friday, 11:00am - 1:00pm)

The colloquium is a lecture every other week by a different professor, sometimes somebody brought in from outside the program and sometimes one of the professors in the program. The basic idea is that the people giving the lecture have written an article for publication and before it gets published they show it around to a bunch of different people to get feedback. So on the weeks we have colloquium, we read the paper, write a short reaction memo, and then on Friday the author gives a talk and responds to the issues we raised in our memos. A lot depends on the subject matter of the article as to whether this is interesting or not, but the past couple ones we've had were pretty cool - one about the challenges to the equal application of humanitarian law to all sides in a war, and one about incorporating persons with disabilities into human rights frameworks.

And there you have it. With the exception of the transnational legal theory course, the classes are all pretty interesting, though there's a distinctly undergrad-y rather than law school-y feel to the semester which makes the academic side of things a lot less rigorous, which can be both bad and good - bad for feeling like you're getting the most out of the courses, good for traveling and having fun with people.