James Upcher
James Upcher, born in Tasmania, died suddenly in 2017 while working in the United Kingdom as a lecturer in the law school of Newcastle University.
I was looking at Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s De Toren van Babel in Rotterdam, where I had gone for the day to escape the low skies and oppressive winds that buffet The Hague in springtime. Bruegel’s masterpiece has an exquisite stillness and delicacy, despite portraying the Tower of Babel in its first stages of busy construction. Ladders and wires are hung from its sides; the harbour on which i ... (read more)
At the time of his death in March 2006, Slobodan Milošević had been on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (the ICTY) for more than four years. Greeted initially as a victory in the ‘struggle against impunity’, the progress of his trial was soon hindered by thickets of procedural argument and by the cunning of Milošević himself. Diverting attention from e ... (read more)
What role should international law play in the domestic legal sphere? The author of the Institutes of Justinian stated that ‘[e]very community governed by laws and customs uses partly its own law, partly laws common to all mankind’. Nevertheless, a certain view propounds that international law is an unstable or subversive intrusion into the processes of democratic sovereignty and the pedigree ... (read more)
Alexander Downer, when asked on the ABC in February 2003 about the legality of military measures against Iraq, was keen to emphasise Australia’s fidelity to international law: ‘We’ve reached a point where you either take international law seriously and ensure that Iraq does comply with international law or else you abandon the whole concept, at least in this case, of trying to enforce intern ... (read more)
Campaigning during the 1912 US presidential election, the great labour leader and socialist Eugene Debs used to tell his supporters that he could not lead them into the Promised Land because if they were trusting enough to be led in they would be trusting enough to be led out again. In other words, he was counselling his voters to resist the easy certitude that zealotry brings; to reject a politic ... (read more)