The Role of Foreign Perceptions in Zivotofsky v. Kerry

On Monday the Supreme Court issued a long-awaited and important decision in Zivotofsky v. Kerry. This was a case about the nature of the President’s power to recognize foreign borders, and it required the Court to address the constitutionality of Section 214(d) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2002, which entitled U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem to have “Jerusalem, Israel” listed on their passports as the place of birth. While the statutory entitlement may seem rather mundane, it conflicted with the Executive Branch’s longstanding policy of strict neutrality on Jerusalem’s status by suggesting that the city is located within Israeli borders. Because the Executive policy dictated that passports list only “Jerusalem,” Presidents Bush and Obama refused to implement the statute. Thus the question: Who gets to decide whether the United States will recognize Jerusalem as Israeli territory–Congress or the President?

The Court sided with the President and declared the statute unconstitutional. I wrote a post addressing one of the interesting issues in the case over at Lawfare; it’s available here.

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The Study of International Law in Foreign Law Schools: A Brief History

In my last post I provided a short history on international legal education in the United States. This time I offer the global equivalent: a (very) rough sense for the evolution of law school study requirements in a number of foreign countries, based on a combination of two UNESCO surveys from the mid-twentieth century and my recent research on contemporary practice.

Here are the results:

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The Study of International Law in American Law Schools: A Brief History

As I’ve discussed in other posts, international law has a fairly peripheral role in American legal education. Only eight schools require their students to complete a course on the subject, and the range of international electives tends to be quite limited. Wondering whether this is only a recent phenomenon or instead something with deeper roots, I did a little research into historical practice. It turns out that scholars have surveyed the state of international legal education in the United States multiple times over the course of the past century. By combining their work—including two particularly good pieces by Manley Hudson (1929) and William Bishop (1953)—with a recent survey of my own, we can gain at least a rough sense for how the curriculum has evolved over time. Here’s what I found:

First, international law had a role even in the Founding era. In 1779, for example, the law of nations was added to the instructional duties of the “moral professor” at William & Mary. In 1790, James Wilson devoted a “considerable part” of his lectures at the College of Philadelphia to the law of nations, while James Kent lectured on the subject at King’s College just a few years later. According to Hudson, “the law of nations had a recognized place in the pursuit of a legal education, and it formed a part of the learning of many of the better-educated lawyers” of the period.

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