Koh defender Laura Dickinson thinks that my exposition of her illogic amounts to an “ad hominem attack.” (Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that someone who practices non sequiturs doesn’t know what ad hominem means.) Meanwhile, she mischaracterizes my arguments. For example, she ignores my simple explanation of “the overall transnationalist game on customary international law” (including the lawmaking role of academics and NGOs) and baselessly suggests that I may be “opposed to judicial review.” And she doesn’t have the decency even to link to my posts (perhaps out of fear that her readers will discover how empty her responses are).
Dickinson complains that I ignore the “core point” of her post, “which is simply that Harold Hongju Koh is a mainstream scholar and lawyer who has won praise from Democrats and Republicans alike and who has even-handedly served in Democratic and Republican administrations.” It shouldn’t be surprising that I responded to her attacks on me rather than bothering with her trivial “core point.” I’ve previously addressed (at the end of this post) the relevance of Koh’s service as a junior career lawyer in the Reagan Administration. As for his being a “mainstream scholar”: I’ll readily acknowledge that in the zoo of modern legal academia, Harold Koh isn’t an especially exotic creature (especially to other animals in the zoo). But that says much more about the state of legal academia than anything else.