Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 22 of 22

Full-Text Articles in Law

Citizenship Overreach, Peter J. Spiro Jan 2017

Citizenship Overreach, Peter J. Spiro

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article examines international law limitations on the ascription of citizenship and national self-definition. The United States is exceptionally generous in its extension of citizenship. Alone among the major developed states, it extends citizenship to almost all persons in its territory at the moment of birth. This birthright citizenship is constitutionally protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. At the same time that it is generous at the front end, U.S. citizenship is sticky at the back. Termination of citizenship on the individual’s part can involve substantial fees. Expatriation is contingent on tax compliance and, in some cases, will implicate the recognition …


A Global Perspective On Citizenship-Based Taxation, Allison Christians Jan 2017

A Global Perspective On Citizenship-Based Taxation, Allison Christians

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article contends that, with regard to individuals who reside permanently outside of the United States, the global assistance sought under FATCA to enforce U.S. income taxation solely on the basis of citizenship violates international law. It argues that insisting upon foreign cooperation with the FATCA regime, under threat of serious economic penalties, is inconsistent with universally accepted norms regarding appropriate limits to the state’s jurisdiction to tax, while also being normatively unjustified. Accordingly, FATCA should be rejected by all other nation states to the extent it imposes any obligations with respect to individuals who permanently reside outside of, and …


Defining Residence For Income Tax Purposes: Domicile As Gap-Filler, Citizenship As Proxy And Gap-Filler, Edward A. Zelinsky Jan 2017

Defining Residence For Income Tax Purposes: Domicile As Gap-Filler, Citizenship As Proxy And Gap-Filler, Edward A. Zelinsky

Michigan Journal of International Law

In this paper, I place the United States’ adherence to citizenship-based taxation in the context of the states’ tax systems. Forty-one states impose general income taxes on the worldwide incomes of their respective residents. These state tax systems are important repositories of experience that confirm the administrative benefits of citizenship-based taxation. Domicile today plays an important role in state tax systems as a gap-filler when more objective statutory residence laws fail to assign any state of residence to the taxpayer. Citizenship is an administrable proxy for domicile and serves a similar gap-filling role in the taxation of individuals whose income …


Human Trafficking In Southeast Asia: Uncovering The Dynamics Of State Commitment And Compliance, Catherine Renshaw Jan 2016

Human Trafficking In Southeast Asia: Uncovering The Dynamics Of State Commitment And Compliance, Catherine Renshaw

Michigan Journal of International Law

In Part I of this Article, Renshaw explains some of the current theories about how and why states come to adopt human rights norms and then translates these norms into laws and policies. In Part II, she sets out the contours of the TVPA and the global regime with which it coexists, the United Nations Palermo Protocol. Part III considers how ASEAN States have responded to the global anti-trafficking regime. Part IV explores how ASEAN states perceive the issue of human trafficking. Part V describes how ASEAN states have responded to the threat of sanctions under the TVPA. Part VI …


Can Self-Regulation Work? Lessons From The Private Security And Military Industry, Daphné Richemond-Barak Phd Jun 2014

Can Self-Regulation Work? Lessons From The Private Security And Military Industry, Daphné Richemond-Barak Phd

Michigan Journal of International Law

The private security and military industry has undergone a dramatic shift over the past decade—from an under-regulated sphere of activity to one in which an array of self-regulatory schemes has emerged. These regulatory initiatives took shape as states, security companies, and the broader public recognized the need to clarify the legal framework applicable to private security and military companies. Private contractors, once regarded as mercenaries, have over the past two decades played an increasingly central role in support of modern militaries. Reasons for this phenomenon range from budgetary policy to the need for specialized expertise most readily available in the …


Paper Compliance: How China Implements Wto Decisions , Timothy Webster Jan 2014

Paper Compliance: How China Implements Wto Decisions , Timothy Webster

Michigan Journal of International Law

China’s growing economic and military clout generates scrutiny, optimism, insecurity, opportunism, opprobrium, and unease around the world, especially in the United States. Many question China’s role on the world stage. Politicians and academics openly doubt China abides by international law and other global standards of state conduct promulgated by Western liberal democracies since the end of World War II. The game may change—international trade, territorial and maritime disputes, environmental law, human rights, arms control, riparian rights, cyber-crime, endangered species—but the concern remains the same: is China an international scofflaw?


Rebalancing Trips, Molly Land Apr 2012

Rebalancing Trips, Molly Land

Michigan Journal of International Law

Application of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) dispute resolution procedures to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS Agreement) has provoked a variety of reactions over time. At its inception, the decision to enforce the treaty through the WTO's dispute resolution process was widely viewed as a loss for developing countries. Many feared it would lead to an explosion of litigation against developing countries and cause distortions in domestic intellectual property (IP) policy making. More recent scholarship, however, has argued that these fears were unfounded. Few disputes before WTO panels have involved violations of the TRIPS Agreement, even …


Toward A Unified Theory Of Professional Ethics And Human Rights, Jonathan H. Marks Feb 2012

Toward A Unified Theory Of Professional Ethics And Human Rights, Jonathan H. Marks

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article offers a novel account of the relationship between the ethical obligations of professionals and international human rights law and practice. The account is motivated by the role that professionals played in the Bush administration's "war on terror"-in particular, the global detention and interrogation regimes that incarcerated tens of thousands of detainees, and abused many of them. In the most extreme cases, professionals may have committed serious international crimes rendering them liable to criminal prosecution in foreign courts. Serious concerns have also been raised about the ethics of professionals' conduct. Psychologists were the principal architects of the aggressive detention …


A Global Panopticon - The Changing Role Of International Organizations In The Information Age, Jennifer Shkabatur Oct 2011

A Global Panopticon - The Changing Role Of International Organizations In The Information Age, Jennifer Shkabatur

Michigan Journal of International Law

The outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002-2003 and Swine Flu (H1N1) in 2009 captured a great deal of global attention. The swift spread of these diseases wreaked havoc, generated public hysteria, disrupted global trade and travel, and inflicted severe economic losses to countries, corporations, and individuals. Although affected states were required to report to the World Health Organization (WHO) events that may have constituted a public health emergency, many failed to do so. The WHO and the rest of the international community were therefore desperate for accurate, up-to-date information as to the nature of the pandemics, their …


Toward A Trips Truce, Patricia L. Judd Jul 2011

Toward A Trips Truce, Patricia L. Judd

Michigan Journal of International Law

The World Trade Organization's (WTO's) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS or Agreement), now over fifteen years old, regulates a marketplace characterized by extraordinary dynamism, influenced by the constant forces of globalization and technological evolution. Attempts to regulate this market raise natural, persistent questions concerning the Agreement's ability to serve its respective constituencies and adapt to change. The Agreement operates in the midst of an age-old dynamic pitting developing and developed countries against one another, especially when it comes to domestic enforcement against piracy and counterfeiting-a dynamic in which TRIPS has been criticized as a one-sided instrument. …


Take The Long Way Home: Sub-Federal Integration Of Unratified And Non-Self-Executing Treaty Law, Lesley Wexler Jan 2006

Take The Long Way Home: Sub-Federal Integration Of Unratified And Non-Self-Executing Treaty Law, Lesley Wexler

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article introduces the longstanding treaty compliance debate and expands it to include the question of whether treaties influence sub-federal actors in non-ratifying countries. This Part draws on norm theory to conclude that sub-federal actors may use treaties and treaty processes as: (a) a framework to understand the underlying substantive issue, (b) a way to reduce drafting costs, (c) a focal point to measure compliance, (d) evidence of an international consensus, (e) a mechanism to express or signal a cosmopolitan identity, or (f) a springboard to criticize the current administration.


Transparency: An Analysis Of An Evolving Fundamental Principle In International Economic Law, Carl-Sebastian Zoellner Jan 2006

Transparency: An Analysis Of An Evolving Fundamental Principle In International Economic Law, Carl-Sebastian Zoellner

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Note will first sketch the theoretical underpinnings of transparency in an interdisciplinary overview of its possible meanings and advantages in the present context. It will then survey documents and instruments of international economic law in which language embracing the transparency principle is already present. The Note's main section proceeds to ask whether, in the actual application of those agreements, the transparency principle has had any notable impact on the interpretation of state obligations. Finally, in addressing transparency's future role in international economic law, this Note briefly discusses additional problems which might be resolved through a transparency-based approach.


What's Your Sign? -- International Norms, Signals, And Compliance, Charles K. Whitehead Jan 2006

What's Your Sign? -- International Norms, Signals, And Compliance, Charles K. Whitehead

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article proposes a new approach to understanding state compliance with international obligations, positing that increased interaction among the world's regulators has reinforced network norms, as evidenced in part by a greater reliance among states on legally nonbinding instruments. This Article also begins to fill a gap in the growing scholarship on state compliance by proposing a better framework for understanding how international norms influence senior regulators and how they affect both state decisions to comply as well as levels of compliance.


The Law And The Non-Law, Katharina Pistor Jan 2006

The Law And The Non-Law, Katharina Pistor

Michigan Journal of International Law

This brief Comment reflects on the construction of the "non-law" as analytical categories in the four contributions. It suggests that the struggle with "non-law" reflects a deeper confusion about the role of law in ordering social relations broadly defined.


International Treaty Enforcement As A Public Good: Institutional Deterrent Sanctions In International Environmental Agreements, Tseming Yang Jan 2006

International Treaty Enforcement As A Public Good: Institutional Deterrent Sanctions In International Environmental Agreements, Tseming Yang

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article approaches the issues through the lens of two general questions. First, what are the functions of treaty enforcement and institutional deterrent sanctions? Second, what are the obstacles to the effective deployment of institutional deterrent sanctions in response to noncompliance? This Article elaborates on the instrumental purposes of enforcement as well as its independent normative function. Much of the analysis follows the recent stream of works that combines both international law and international relations theory. These works offer a rich understanding of the conduct of states and the functioning of international legal regimes.


The Value Vacuum: Self-Enforcing Regimes And The Dilution Of The Normative Feedback Loop, Claire R. Kelly Jan 2001

The Value Vacuum: Self-Enforcing Regimes And The Dilution Of The Normative Feedback Loop, Claire R. Kelly

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article proposes a modified constructivist theory, which links liberalism and constructivism through the normative feedback loop. Part I briefly explains traditional international relations theories such as realism, institutionalism, liberalism and constructivism. A modified constructivist perspective espouses the presence of two constants: (i) assertion of national preferences by constituents for whom the state acts as an agent in international relations, and (ii) social construction of state identities through interaction with other states in the international arena.


Sovereignty, Compliance, And The World Trade Organization: Lessons From The History Of Supreme Court Review, Mark L. Movsesian Jan 1999

Sovereignty, Compliance, And The World Trade Organization: Lessons From The History Of Supreme Court Review, Mark L. Movsesian

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article explores the nineteenth-century conflict over Supreme Court review and discusses its implications for today's debate on the WTO. Congress granted the Court appellate jurisdiction over state courts in one of its earliest pieces of legislation, the Judiciary Act of 1789. The first serious challenge to that jurisdiction occurred about a quarter-century later, however, in connection with the Court's famous opinion in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee. The conflict continued episodically for the next four decades, with several states refusing to acknowledge the Court's jurisdiction in particular cases, and ended only with the Civil War, which resolved this and …


The Concept Of Compliance As A Function Of Competing Conceptions Of International Law, Benedict Kingsbury Jan 1998

The Concept Of Compliance As A Function Of Competing Conceptions Of International Law, Benedict Kingsbury

Michigan Journal of International Law

The purpose of this article is to challenge the tendency in the existing literature to view "compliance" simply as "correspondence of behavior with legal rules." This tendency is intelligibly based in a theoretical view that law can properly be defined and understood as a body of rules and expresses a practical concern to get on with the important task of producing empirical studies of compliance. The logical corollary is that a reasonable degree of conformity between these rules and actual behavior is necessary to an efficacious legal system, so that recurrent and widespread non-conformity with rules would usually call into …


Why Nations Behave, Jose E. Alvarez Jan 1998

Why Nations Behave, Jose E. Alvarez

Michigan Journal of International Law

The idea for this symposium on "implementation, compliance and effectiveness" grew out of the 1997 annual meeting of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), devoted to that theme. As one of the co-chairs of that meeting, I suggested to the student editors of this journal that they solicit articles on a topic that has seized the attention of researchers within international law as well as in seemingly unrelated fields. As Professor Thomas Franck has indicated in a recent well-received book, an ever increasing number of scholars are going beyond well-worn debates about whether international law is truly "law" to …


Conceptual, Methodological And Substantive Issues Entwined In Studying Compliance, Harold K. Jacobson Jan 1998

Conceptual, Methodological And Substantive Issues Entwined In Studying Compliance, Harold K. Jacobson

Michigan Journal of International Law

In his insightful introduction to this collection Jose E. Alvarez refers to the popularity of studies of "why nations behave." He explains this popularity as a response to the increasing waves of international regulation that have occurred during the closing years of the twentieth century, regulation that frequently involves issues previously left to nation states. As one who has been a participant over the past decade in an effort to discover answers to the question that Alvarez put so clearly, the author is pleased by the broad interest that the subject has gained and feels privileged to have an opportunity …


Advancing The Law Of Weapons Control - Comparative Approaches To Strengthen Nuclear Non-Proliferation, David S. Gualtieri, Barry Kellman, Kenneth E. Apt, Edward A. Tanzman Jan 1995

Advancing The Law Of Weapons Control - Comparative Approaches To Strengthen Nuclear Non-Proliferation, David S. Gualtieri, Barry Kellman, Kenneth E. Apt, Edward A. Tanzman

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article analyzes in-depth the SAGSI recommendation that more effective safeguards draw upon "the elements (including the managed access provisions) contained in Part X of the Verification Annex to the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.” SAGSI found that the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) offers approaches for verification and investigation that may be adaptable to the NPT.


United States Compliance With The 1967 Gatt Antidumping Code, Robert E. Hudec Jan 1979

United States Compliance With The 1967 Gatt Antidumping Code, Robert E. Hudec

Michigan Journal of International Law

The 1967 GATT Antidumping Code (hereinafter the Code) may be viewed as an attempt to state an international consensus about the correct policy and practice of national antidumping laws. It is important to be clear about the nature of that consensus. National antidumping laws are not an expression of accepted economic theory about international trade. Rather, they tend to rest on more pedestrian value judgments about things such as "fair competition." These underlying value judgments are not necessarily the same from one country to another, and in some countries antidumping laws are not even considered particularly useful or necessary. In …