New ISS Paper: 'African efforts to close the impunity gap'

The Institute for Security Studies have published a paper on 'African efforts to close the impunity gap: Lessons for complementarity from national and regional actions'. Max du Plessis is the lead author of the paper, which was launched last week in The Hague at the 11th Assembly of States Parties of the ICC. According to the authors: 

"The position taken by the African Union towards the ICC creates the impression that African states are resistant to international criminal justice. This paper demonstrates that the reality is quite different. Many African countries are committed to ending impunity: a majority have ratified the Rome Statute, four have referred situations to the ICC, and most comply with the Court’s requests for cooperation. The continent provides various examples of international justice in practice, either in the form of ICC complementarity or a wider array of justice processes driven by governments and civil society aimed at closing the impunity gap. The paper considers these developments and what they mean for our understanding of complementarity."

The paper is available here. 

Say sayonara to "Spidey sense"

A CBS News profile of Nate Silver, author of 538.

Not that we should expect law professors, a group whose political sensitivities vastly exceed its collective quantitative talent, to have taken close note, but the 2012 election staged "a pitched battle between two self-assured rivals: those who relied on an unscientific mixture of experience, anecdotal details and 'Spidey sense,'and those who stuck to cold, hard numbers." Quite unsurprisingly, the quants won.

In MoneyLaw terms, the lesson for legal education should be obvious. Law as a purely instinctive enterprise is giving way — in many respects, it has already given way — to law as a branch of engineering and the quantitative arts. This forum will have many future occasions to demonstrate exactly why this is true. For now, sit back and just enjoy the show.