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Full-Text Articles in Law
What Is International Economic Law?, Steve Charnovitz
What Is International Economic Law?, Steve Charnovitz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article attempts to define international economic law and its role in the international legal regime. After describing various options for the definition of international economic law, the article discusses the history of policy developments that led to the creation of international economic law as a field of legal scholarship. The article then discusses the role that various academics have played in the development of scholarship in this area and notes that international economic law garnered high popularity in the early 1980s because of a treatise written by Pieter VerLoren van Themaat. The article concludes by considering the relationship of …
International Law And Domestic Legal Systems: Incorporation, Transformation, And Persuasion (Introduction), Dinah L. Shelton
International Law And Domestic Legal Systems: Incorporation, Transformation, And Persuasion (Introduction), Dinah L. Shelton
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This book discusses developments in international law and their relationship to national legal systems. The introduction of the book notes that countries who received their independence from authoritarian regimes are more receptive to international law. A country may adopt either a monist approach to international law, where it considers international law part of its domestic law, or a dualist approach, in which a country separates its national law from international law. The introduction then proceeds to identify sources of international law, including treaties and countries’ methods of complying, customary international law, and declarations. The introduction concludes by noting the increasing …
The Legal Status Of Normative Pronouncements Of Human Rights Treaty Bodies, Dinah L. Shelton
The Legal Status Of Normative Pronouncements Of Human Rights Treaty Bodies, Dinah L. Shelton
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This essay examines international human rights treaties and the statements that tribunals and other organizations make about them. Next, the essay discusses the general non-binding nature of treaties and describes use of General Comments and other interpretive statements. The essay concludes that increasing unofficial commentary on human rights organs’ decisions and increased compliance will encourage more states to comply and make it “increasingly difficult for a single state to hold out.”
The Alien Tort Statute And The Law Of Nations, Bradford R. Clark, Anthony J. Bellia Jr.
The Alien Tort Statute And The Law Of Nations, Bradford R. Clark, Anthony J. Bellia Jr.
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Courts and scholars have struggled to identify the original meaning of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). As enacted in 1789, the ATS provided "[t]hat the district courts... shall... have cognizance... of all causes where an alien sues for a tort only in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." The statute was rarely invoked for almost two centuries until, in the 1980s, lower federal courts began reading the statute expansively to allow foreign citizens to sue other foreign citizens for violations of modern customary international law that occurred outside the United States. In 2004 …
Bespoke Custom, Edward T. Swaine
Bespoke Custom, Edward T. Swaine
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Curtis Bradley and Mitu Gulati’s stimulating article, “Withdrawing from International Custom,” argues for a view of customary international law (CIL) in which unilateral exit rights may be revitalized. This response suggests that Bradley and Gulati’s understanding of the intellectual history of CIL is contestable and that, they tend both to understate the novelty of their approach and overstate the rigidity of the views to which they react. Their tentativeness in endorsing exit options makes it difficult to assess the normative implications of their position, but their argument notably lacks a comprehensive consideration of alternative lawmaking forms.
International Human Rights In A Nutshell, Thomas Buergenthal, Dinah L. Shelton, David P. Stewart
International Human Rights In A Nutshell, Thomas Buergenthal, Dinah L. Shelton, David P. Stewart
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This book describes the development of international human rights law. The main difference today is that individuals receive protection as individuals independent from their affiliation with a nation, as compared to the traditional consideration that only states had rights under international law. The law of humanitarian intervention first suggested that states do not receive unlimited discretion in their behavior under international law. The first chapter describes the earliest treaties and agreements giving rise to the current status of international law, such as the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization.
Putting Missouri V. Holland On The Map, Edward T. Swaine
Putting Missouri V. Holland On The Map, Edward T. Swaine
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This paper, published as part of symposium on Missouri v. Holland, explores how the circumstances of that case relate to modern criticisms of Congress' Necessary and Proper power and the doctrine of non-self-executing treaties. Focusing on some of the original concerns - for example, the need for further domestic implementation by Canada (and not, to the same degree, by the United States), the need for spending legislation, and the provision of criminal penalties - unsettles not only the understanding of the Supreme Court's decision, but also more recent critiques of the doctrines with which it has long been associated.
Soft Law, Dinah L. Shelton
Soft Law, Dinah L. Shelton
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
International law is a largely consensual system, consisting of norms that states in sovereign equality freely accept to govern themselves and other subjects of law. International law is thus created by states, using procedures that they have agreed are legislative, that is, through procedures identified by them as the appropriate means to create legally-binding obligations. In contrast to the agreed sources listed in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Statute, state practice in recent years, inside and outside international organizations, increasingly has placed normative statements in non binding political instruments such as declarations, resolutions, and programs of action, and has …
Reserving, Edward T. Swaine
Reserving, Edward T. Swaine
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The law of treaty reservations - which enables states to ask that their multilateral obligations be tailored to their individual preferences - has been controversial for over fifty years, and is at present subject to pitched battles within (and between) the International Law Commission and numerous other international institutions. There is broad agreement that existing scheme under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties involves a sharp tradeoff between honoring the unalloyed consent of non-reserving states (that is, those agreeing to the treaty as originally negotiated, which may object to proposed reservations) and respecting the conditioned consent of reserving …
Restoring (And Risking) Interest In International Law, Edward T. Swaine
Restoring (And Risking) Interest In International Law, Edward T. Swaine
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School articulate a comprehensive and engaging theory of state behaviors in their new book, “The Limits of International Law,” but with several internal flaws. Their book uses rational choice theory to explain how states act rationally to maximize their interests, and how, in doing so, states align themselves (sometimes) with international law. This book review argues that while Limits is a skilled and pioneering work that deserves to be taken seriously, it also suffers from tensions and over-generalizations that undermine its claims. As a result, …
Against Principled Antitrust, Edward T. Swaine
Against Principled Antitrust, Edward T. Swaine
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Competition policy is on the WTO agenda for the Doha Round, but it is unlikely that it will result in any substantive international standards; the goal, instead, seems to be to agree on core principles to guide the development of national law, including transparency, non-discrimination, and procedural fairness, perhaps extending to special and differential treatment for developing countries. While there is much to commend these principles, this paper takes a deliberately contrarian view, arguing that core principles are not at all where WTO competition policy should begin. It further disputes the appropriateness of applying an emerging meta-principle of the WTO …
Commitment And Compliance: The Role Of Non-Binding Norms In The International Legal System (Introduction), Dinah L. Shelton
Commitment And Compliance: The Role Of Non-Binding Norms In The International Legal System (Introduction), Dinah L. Shelton
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The introductory chapter of this book describes a study undertaken to determine the extent to which states comply with non-binding legal principles as compared to rules of law and focused on environmental soft law. The leaders of the study provided four factors they predicted would have an effect on compliance with soft law: institutional setting, regional diversity, the type of obligation, and generality and specificity. The chapter next describes the international legal system and its recent expansion, then describes a variety of methods for resolving international issues. Next, the chapter notes a few possible reasons why states prefer to undertake …