Law Commons^™

Metaphors Of International Law, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

This chapter explores international law in search of its hidden and not-so-hidden metaphors. In so doing, it discovers a world inhabited by states, where rules are mined or picked when ripe, where trade keeps boats forever afloat on rising tides. But is also unveils a world in which voices are silenced, inequality is ignored, and hands are washed of responsibility.

International law is built on metaphors. Metaphors provide a language to describe and convey the law’s operation, help international lawyers identify legal subjects and categorize situations in doctrinal categories, and provide normative justifications for the law. Exploring their operation at …

Interpretive Entrepreneurs, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

Private actors interpret legal norms, a phenomenon I call "interpretive entrepreneurship." The phenomenon is particularly significant in the international context, where many disputes are not subject to judicial resolution and there is no official system of precedent. Interpretation can affect the meaning of laws over time. For this reason, it can be a form of "post hoc" international lawmaking, worth studying alongside other forms of international lobbying and norm entrepreneurship by private actors. The Article identifies and describes the phenomenon through a series of case studies that show how, why, and by whom it unfolds. The examples focus on entrepreneurial …

Nations And Markets, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

Economics and security seem increasingly intertwined. Citing national security, states subject foreign investments to new scrutiny, even unwinding mergers like the purchase of Grindr or the creation of TikTok. The provision of 5G has become a diplomatic battleground – Huawei at its center. Meanwhile, states invoke national security to excuse trade wars. The U.S. invoked the GATT national security exception to impose steel and aluminum tariffs, threatening more on automotive parts. Russia invoked that provision to justify its blockade of Ukraine, as did Saudi Arabia and the UAE to excuse theirs of Qatar. And with the spread of COVID-19, states …

Interstitial Space Law, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

Conventionally, customary international law is developed through the actions and beliefs of nations. International treaties are interpreted, in part, by assessing how the parties to the treaty behave. This Article observes that these forms of uncodified international law—custom and subsequent treaty practice—are also developed through a nation’s reactions, or failures to react, to acts and beliefs that can be attributed to it. I call this “attributed lawmaking.”

Consider the new commercial space race. Innovators like SpaceX and Blue Origin seek a permissive legal environment. A Cold-War-era treaty does not seem adequately to address contemporary plans for space. The treaty does, …

Fragmentation, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

A danger, an opportunity, passé, a cliché, destabilizing, empowering, destructive, creative: Depending on whom you ask, fragmentation has meant any and all of these for international law. The concept of fragmentation has been a mirror reflecting international lawyers’ perception of themselves, their field, and its prospects for the future.

This chapter chronicles fragmentation’s meanings over the past few decades. In particular, it focuses on the spreading fears of fragmentation around the millennium, how the fears were eventually repurposed, where, speculatively, those fear may have gone, and how and to what extent faith in international law was restored.

...And Trade, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

This short essay, part of a symposium on Gregory Shaffer’s Retooling Trade Agreements for Social Inclusion, argues that the normal science of trade law lacks the tools to confront trade law’s greatest current challenges. Instead, breaking out of trade law’s two-step politics, with its division of “growing the pie” and distributing its slices, and responding to new challenges of climate change, the digital economy, and artificial intelligence will require a new politics built on and designed to build new shared narratives embodying new policy paradigms.

Multilateralism’S Life-Cycle, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

Does multilateralism have a life-cycle? Perhaps paradoxically, this essay suggests that current pressures on multilateralism and multilateral institutions, including threatened withdrawals by the United Kingdom from the European Union, the United States from the Paris climate change agreement, South Africa, Burundi, and Gambia from the International Criminal Court, and others, may be natural symptoms of those institutions’ relative success. Successful multilateralism and multilateral institutions, this essay argues, has four intertwined effects, which together, make continued multilateralism more difficult: (1) the wider dispersion of wealth or power among members, (2) the decreasing value for members of issue linkages, (3) changing assessment …

Newsletter, Fall 2011, Vol. 6, Issue 1, The Dean Rusk International Law Center

Newsletters

Ambassador Delivers Keynote at International Trade Conference; Georgia Democratic Leader Speaks at Civil Rights Conference; International Outreach and Education; International Law Colloquium Series; Conferences & Lectures; Notable Speakers Visit Rusk Center; Conference Focuses on Nuclear Security and Non-Proliferation; The TRIPS Agreement - Then and Now; In Memoriam: Professor Gabriel M. Wilner, 1938-2010; Law School Alum Joins Rusk Center Staff; International Judicial Training Program Continues to Expand.

Legal Aspects Of International Transfer Of Technology, Anna Mikhailovna Otkina

LLM Theses and Essays

For any international law practitioner issues relating to technology and proprietary information can arise in a number of a different situation. For example, transactions involving foreign distribution and sales rights relating to domestic products are a common part of the day-to-day practice of anyone engaged in the multinational business arena. Many of those transactions involve a contractual agreement in the form of a license, which is intended to transfer to the licensee the technology and related information, and the legal rights therewith, necessary to complete successfully the objective of the transaction: the distribution and sale of the domestic product at …

The Transfer Of Technology To Latin America, Gabriel M. Wilner

Scholarly Works

The transfer of technology to Latin America has taken place through both the licensing process and direct investments by foreign enterprises that are often transnational corporations. National law has concerned itself first with the creation of rights in technological knowledge and the protection of these rights by law. The regulation of these rights as set out in contractual relationships and the regulation of direct investment, particularly the technological component thereof, were dealt with thereafter. Other matters such as the repatriation of profits (exchange control), customs controls, and various taxes have also become a part of the national regulatory scene today. …