Digital Commons Network^™

Liberty, Equality, Diversity: States, Cultures And International Law, Ana Filipa Vrdoljak

Ana Filipa Vrdoljak

This chapter explores how culture is addressed by contemporary international law, with particular reference to human rights law norms. The first part covering freedom focuses on the rise of the modern state and its conscious reimagining of ties with its citizens through the promotion of tolerance and a secular, national identity. The shift is explored through the prisms of the freedom of religion, the right to participate in (national) cultural life, and the limitations on freedom of expression including prohibition of hate speech and domestic blasphemy laws. The second part on equality centres on the relationship between the state, the …

Global Poverty And The Right To Development In International Law, Patrick Macklem

Patrick Macklem

This Article advances an account of the right to development as a legal instrument that holds the international legal order accountable for its role in the production and reproduction of global poverty. It first distinguishes moral conceptions of human rights, as instruments that protect universal features of humanity, from legal conceptions, which tie their existence to their specification in international instruments promulgated in compliance with international legal norms governing the creation of legal rights and obligations. Despite textual ambiguities in the various instruments in which it finds expression, the right to development vests in individuals and communities who have yet …

Ending Judgment Arbitrage: Jurisdictional Competition And The Enforcement Of Foreign Money Judgments In The United States, Gregory Shill

Gregory Shill

Recent multi-billion-dollar damage awards issued by foreign courts against large American companies have focused attention on the once-obscure, patchwork system of enforcing foreign-country judgments in the United States. That system’s structural problems are even more serious than its critics have charged. However, the leading proposals for reform overlook the positive potential embedded in its design.

In the United States, no treaty or federal law controls the domestication of foreign judgments; the process is instead governed by state law. Although they are often conflated in practice, the procedure consists of two formally and conceptually distinct stages: foreign judgments must first be …