Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Catriona Drew
A decade after Iraq, the chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians in Eastern Damascus on 21 August 2013 sparked a political and public debate in the United Kingdom about the legality of military intervention. For international-law veterans of Kosovo and Iraq, the central question was familiar.
For billions around the world, poverty translates not only into a struggle for food, shelter, health, and education. No, poverty exposes them to a vast spectrum of human rights abuses on a daily basis. Safety and freedom from fear do not exist for those living in underdeveloped areas. Ill-equipped judicial systems, under-trained and corrupt law enforcement agencies, and despotic housing complexes are just a few of the challenges the impoverished face.
By Dr Christopher Kuner
On the occasion of international Data Protection Day on the 28th of January, I would like to explore how European data protection law can become more efficient and effective, and better tailored to the needs of individuals.
By Steve Sheppard
In a recent post on Volokh Conspiracy, George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr writes that we have passed the “Golden Age of Treatises.” Considering an obituary of a law professor who had written a law treatise, Securities Regulation, Kerr observed how its author, Louis Loss, had been seen as giving shape and direction to a whole field of law.
By Julia Hӧrnle
In the offline world the distribution of pornography has been strictly controlled. Age-verification and rating stems ensure that minors cannot access hardcore pornography. The British Board of Film Classification rates cinema and DVD content; content rated as R18 can only be shown in specialised cinemas with strict age-verification standards and certain pornographic content will not be rated for cinema or DVD distribution.
By Stuart Casey-Maslen
More than 9,500 people were killed in Mexico in 2012 as a result of armed violence, primarily as the result of conflict between the Sinaloa cartel, the Las Zetas gang, and the state. Tens of thousands of Mexican troops and police were involved in these conflicts, and more than 400 were killed during the year.
What is investor-state arbitration? And how does it impact upon people’s lives? Today, we present a Q&A with Gus Van Harten, author of Sovereign Choices and Sovereign Constraints, where he explains the fundamentals of investor-state arbitration and its place in international law.
By Viktoria Baklanova and Joseph Tanega
In the name of financial stability, institutional and product regulations since the 2008 financial crisis have forced banks and non-bank banks (the so-called “shadow banks”) to create insatiable compliance regimes. But the juggernaut does not stop here.
The internet has come a long way since the first “electronic mail” was sent back in 1971… but with its rapid advancement come challenges to cybersecurity and the increasing threat of cyberterrorism, both on an individual level as well as on a larger global scale. In their new book, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, experts P.W. Singer and Allan Friedman warn us that we may not be as secure online as we think we are.
With over 30,000 media reports and academic studies on the dangers of cyberterrorism, surely the threat today could not be greater? But as P.W. Singer, author of the bestselling Wired for War and co-author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, points out — not a single person has died in a cyberterror attack.
Compiled by Katherine Marshall
We asked a number of experts to share their most important international law moment or development with us.
By G. Edward White
There has been a good deal of recent commentary about a perceived “crisis” in American legal education. A combination of rising tuition rates for law schools and a decline in the number of entry-level jobs in the legal profession has resulted in reduced numbers of applicants to law schools, and a corresponding reduction in entering law school class sizes.
By P.A.J. Waddington
Many of those who have commented on the Mark Duggan inquest jury verdict have expressed disquiet at the jury’s conclusion that whilst the killing by police officers was lawful, Duggan was not holding the gun at the time he was shot. This is not as bizarre as it might first appear.
By Edward Zelinsky
Judge Clark Waddoups of the US District Court for the District of Utah has declared unconstitutional parts of Utah’s statute outlawing polygamy. Utah’s statute was challenged in Judge Waddoups’ courtroom by the Brown family of the television show Sister Wives. Days later, Judge Robert J. Shelby, also of the US District Court for the District of Utah, declared unconstitutional Utah’s Amendment 3 which restricts Utah’s definition of marriage to a man and a woman.
By Liz Fisher
I sit here writing this on New Year’s Day. Looking back at 2013 it has been a year in which there has been a growing disjunction between academic discourse and political discourse over environmental issues. On the one hand academic and scholarly discourses have become more sophisticated.
By Kenneth R. Johnson
Jonathan Freedland wonders, “Why Surveillance Doesn’t Faze Britain”? Comparing his fellow British subjects to Americans, he finds them “curiously complacent” about their civil liberties when it comes to the massive invasions of privacy implied by Edward Snowden’s revelations of the U.S. National Security Agency’s “big data” scoops of information from digital communication sources.