Dr Duke Bagulaya

07/10/2026

War is no dinner party, but Chinese director Wen Muye has released another movie, Dragon Restaurant, which ,yes, engages with armed conflict and food. His earlier film, I'm not the god of medicine, wrestled with what might be called transnational law. (I have an unpublished analysis of that powerful film for review.) Now, Wen's new movie is as much about law as it is about war and food. What's interesting here is that Wen again deals with law, this time public, rather than private international law. Even more surprising is the movie's subject- the participation of children in war. It's a subject that I have worked on, particularly the conflict between international law 's ideal image of children and the utopian imaginary of social movements, which views children as agents of social change or resistance. Reading the film through the conflict between the utopian imaginary of film and international law will reveal an implicit position in the film, perhaps made implicit by censors or by simply being the predominant world view in Chinese society.

26/09/2026

Shakespeare's King Lear is not manifestly about law. But there is a connection to law. After all, it begins with the disinheretance of Cordelia. Shakespeare's a difficult reading, so Kurosawa's colorful Ran served as my introduction to Shakespeare. It was a memorable one.

14/09/2026

A Filipino literary criticism on Shakespeare's sonnet 133:

Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward
(Before a warrant reaches you, go straight to the hospital ward)

But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail; (the heart is fine, but there is no bail)

Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard
(I think there are too many guards)

Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail...
(A court may order a transfer from ward to jail )

13/09/2026

If there is a single justification for studying law, it was my encounter with this book, The Politics of Law. This collection of American critical legal studies offered an intellectual critique of law from within the field of law. With chapters ranging from Duncan Kennedy's 'Legal education as training for hierarchy' to Peter Gabel's 'Contract law as ideology' and Martha Minow's 'Politics and procedure,' I saw the possibilities of thinking about law. Later editions added Jane Baron's & Julia Epstein's 'Language and the law' and Cornel West's 'The role of law in progressive politics', thus updating the book. Looking back, the book reconfigured my own understanding of law. This time I perceived law as something that is shaped by both practical and intellectual action.

12/09/2026

New Issue of Leiden Journal of International Law now available
📚 https://cup.org/46OLp28

06/09/2026

Now in Leyte. Here is American constitutional law's rough equivalent to the NBA all-stars. Kahn, Barnett, Levinson, Posner, Ely, Garvey, Fish, Stone, Bickel, Fiss, GE White, Pound, Rabban, Graber, Mackinnon etc.

05/09/2026

A day or two ago, the Indonesian haze reached Leyte (and before that Manila). It forced me to return to this book on the concept of Transboundary Harm, which arose from the Trail Smelter case, a locus classicus of international environmental law. The dictum of the case is unequivocal: under the principles of international law...no State has the right to use or permit the use of its territory in such a manner as to cause injury by fumes in or to the territory of another....

So why does the recurrence of this pollution affecting ASEAN neighbours, especially Singapore, not lead to a demand for compensation?

The academic chapters provide an answer. The dictum in Trail Smelter actually does not fit so well with the international law of state responsibility and is less influential in state liability. M Drumbl, the current editor of International Criminal Law Review, states that the jurisprudential legacy of the case lies in the area of prevention and not reparations. Moreover, J Ellis also argues that the case's holding is an " expression of the principle of good neighborliness or sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedes."

The case certainly reveals the nature of international law: various rules are sometimes incoherent, and contradictory. It is interpretation that makes it appear a unified whole.

30/08/2026

"Regions are social constructs. They might be defined by natural factors such as geographic delineation, cultural divisions, and historical experience. Yet in reality, regions are more often efforts to transcend the effects of these patterns...There would be no region -building without a social concept and a sociological or political construction"- Ludger Kuhnhardt, Region-Building, 2010.

23/08/2026

In US v Schwimmer, Holmes argued the classic thought in free speech, which applies to all: "[I]f there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other...𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 — 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐚𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐮𝐬 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐨𝐦 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞.”

My American hero, Justice O W Holmes, was a champion of free speech. But the transformation of his free speech doctrine came after his confrontation with radical immigrants whose beliefs deviated from the norms of American society. It was the Alien Neighbor that brought about the best of American constitutional law : '...the usual notion is that you are free to say what you like if you don't shock me. Of course the value of the constitutional right is only when you do shock people...'

23/08/2026

Looking at some old pics, I saw this screen shot from five years ago when my work on the insurgent child in international law and Philippine literature appeared in the Grotius institute's Leiden jil. Anyone who knows the field of international law would recognize Frederic Megret and Jean d'Aspremont. Kravik is now deputy foreign minister of Norway.