by Kenneth Anderson
My new Weekly Standard essay – although “polemic” is probably closer to it. And thanks, Julian, for the plug below! Well, regular readers have been hearing about this piece for a while, and I have posted various arguments from it (concerning targeted killing and Predator drones and the CIA and armed conflict and self-defense, and my general concern that the Obama administration has embraced a policy that its lawyers have not so far stood up publicly to defend as lawful against its gradually emerging critics in the international “soft law” community) here at Opinio Juris and at Volokh Conspiracy. I will post a couple of comments on the piece later, including of couple of things I wish I had clarified or said differently. Meanwhile, if you are interested, it is the cover in this week’s Weekly Standard (March 8, 2010). It is also very, very long, at some 8,000 words — for which I am deeply grateful to the WS’s editors but you perhaps will not be — and so you might find it easier to read a pdf of the print edition at SSRN.
I have been meaning to add, though, that several positions are emerging in new scholarship coming out on this topic. I’m not the only person defending “self defense” as the correct paradigm, for example. Jordan Paust has an important new paper on this, and although we come to very different conclusions as to what and how self-defense does things for you, we share a foundation in international law of self-defense. Mary Ellen O’Connell also has a well known position, ably set out in this book chapter, and which I criticize in passing in the WS. John Radsan and Richard Murphy stake out an interesting position that calls for some form of judicial review of targeted killing, in this new Cardozo paper. And, of course, the Ur-Text on the subject (even when I disagree with it!) Nils Melzer’s treatise, Targeted Killing in International Law (Oxford 2008), which I see is now out in paperback at $50 (but no Kindle edition). I will come back in a separate post both to comment on some things from the WS essay at a less political level, and also to give a better sense of where my position sits in relation to others in the international law community. Finally, I’d like to thank and congratulate the Harvard National Security Journal for its upcoming symposium on robotics, drones, and related topics this week – it promises to be very interesting, and I believe the journal might post some account of it or perhaps some video of the program.