Law Commons^™

Soft Law As Delegation, Timothy Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines one of the most important trends in international legal governance since the end of the Second World War: the rise of "soft law," or legally non-binding instruments. Scholars studying the design of international agreements have long puzzled over why states use soft law. The decision to make an agreement or obligation legally binding is within the control of the states negotiating the content of the legal obligations. Basic contract theory predicts that parties to a contract would want their agreement to be as credible as possible, to ensure optimal incentives to perform. It is therefore odd that …

Historical Practice And The Contemporary Debate Over Customary International Law, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

Response to: Anthony J. Bellia, Jr. & Bradford R. Clark, The Federal Common Law of Nations, 109 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (2009).

A.J. Bellia and Brad Clark have performed a valuable service for other scholars interested in foreign relations law and federal jurisdiction by collecting and illuminating—with their usual care and insight—the historical practice of both English and early American courts with respect to the law of nations. Their recent Article, The Federal Common Law of Nations, demonstrates that, while American courts have not generally treated customary international law (CIL) as supreme federal law, they have applied such law where …

Unpacking The State’S Reputation, Rachel Brewster

Faculty Scholarship

International law scholars debate when international law matters to states, how it matters, and whether we can improve compliance. One of the few areas of agreement is that fairly robust levels of compliance can be achieved by tapping into states’ concerns with their reputation. The logic is intuitively appealing: a state that violates international law develops a bad reputation, which leads other states to exclude the violator from future cooperative opportunities. Anticipating a loss of future gains, states will often comply with international rules that are not in their immediate interests. The level of compliance that reputation can sustain depends, …

Shadow Unilateralism: Enforcing International Trade Law At The Wto, Rachel Brewster

Faculty Scholarship

This short essay briefly traces the evolution of trade law enforcement from the the GATT to the WTO regime. The WTO's Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) is widely viewed as a major innovation from the GATT regime in that it subordinates unilateral enforcement of trade law to a rule-based system of multilateral enforcement. I recognize the successes of the WTO regime but the institution effective permits (if not encourages) the unilateral enforcement of trade law outside of the DSU framework Specifically, I examine how the DSU system only provides a prospective remedy - that is, the DSU permits retaliation only for …

Islands Of Effective International Adjudication: Constructing An Intellectual Property Rule Of Law In The Andean Community, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter, M. Florencia Guerzovich

Faculty Scholarship

The Andean Community - a forty-year-old regional integration pact of small developing countries in South America - is widely viewed as a failure. In this Article, we show that the Andean Community has in fact achieved remarkable success within one part of its legal system. The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is the world's third most active international court, with over 1400 rulings issued to date. Over 90% of those rulings concern intellectual property (IP). The ATJ has helped to establish IP as a rule of law island in the Andean Community where national judges, administrative officials, and private parties …

The United States, Israel, And Unlawful Combatants, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers how members of a terrorist organization should be categorized under international law when the organization is engaged in an armed conflict with a nation. The proper categorization can have significant implications for the nation’s authority under both international and domestic law to subject members of a terrorist organization to military targeting and detention. As a result of judicial decisions, Israel ostensibly follows a two category approach, pursuant to which anyone who is not a lawful combatant, including a member of a terrorist organization, is a civilian. The United States, by contrast, currently follows a three category approach, …

Mechanism Choice, Jonathan B. Wiener, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews the literature on the selection of regulatory policy instruments, from both normative and positive perspectives. It first reviews the mechanism design literature to identify normative objectives in selecting among the menu or toolbox of policy instruments. The chapter then discusses the public choice and positive political theory literatures and the variety of models developed to attempt to predict the actual selection of alternative policy instruments. It begins with simpler early models focusing on interest group politics and proceeds to more complicated models that incorporate both supply and demand for policy, the role of policy entrepreneurs, behavioral and …

Dispute Systems Design: The United Nations Compensation Commission, Francis Mcgovern

Faculty Scholarship

The Security Council of the United Nations established the United Nations Compensation Commission (“UNCC”) with its Resolution 687 on April 3, 1991.1 It was the first compensation system established under the authority of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter and was designed to process and pay claims arising from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The purpose of this paper is to examine the design of the UNCC from a variety of perspectives: its historical setting, the alternative design approaches that have been taken in other compensation contexts, the details of its design, and its role in the design …

Treaties As "Part Of Our Law", Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Why The Chinese Public Prefer Administrative Petitioning Over Litigation, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the Chinese public, when facing disputes with government officials, have preferred a non-legal means of resolution, the Xinfang system, over litigation. Some scholars explain this by claiming that administrative litigation is less effective than Xinfang petitioning. Others argue that the Chinese have historically eschewed litigation and continue to do so habitually. This paper proposes a new explanation: Chinese have traditionally litigated administrative disputes, but only when legal procedure is not too adversarial and allows for the possibility of reconciliation through court-directed settlement. Since this possibility does not formally exist in modern Chinese administrative litigation, people tend to …

Compulsory Licensing Of Patented Pharmaceutical Inventions: Evaluating The Options, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

In this Comment, the author traces the relevant legislative history pertaining to compulsory licensing of patented pharmaceuticals from the TRIPS Agreement of 1994 to the 2003 waiver to, and later proposed amendment of, article 31, which enables poor countries to obtain needed medicines from other countries that possess manufacturing capacity. The Comment then evaluates recent, controversial uses of the relevant legislative machinery as viewed from different critical perspectives. The Comment shows how developing countries seeking access to esential medicines can collaborate in ways that would avoid undermining incentives to innovation and other social costs attributed to compulsory licensing. It ends …

Recognition And Enforcement Of Foreign Judgments, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

International Common Law: The Soft Law Of International Tribunals, Andrew T. Guzman, Timothy L. Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Umdenken Für Die Unidroit - Prinzipien: Vom Rechtswahlstatut Zum Allgemeinen Teil Des Transnationalen Vertragsrechts [Rethinking The Unidroit Principles: From A Law To Be Chosen By The Parties Towards A General Part Of Transnational Contract Law], Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The most talked-about purpose of the UNIDROIT Principles of International and Commercial Contracts (PICC) is their applicability as the law chosen by the parties. However, focusing on this purpose in isolation is erroneous. The PICC are not a good candidate for a chosen law - they are conceived not as a result of the exercise of freedom of contract, but instead as a framework to enable such exercise. Their real potential is to serve as objective law - as the general part of transnational contract law.

This is obvious in practice. Actually, choice of the PICC is widely possible. National …

Foreign Officials And Sovereign Immunity In U.S. Courts, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.