Legal History Commons^™

A Prolegomenon To The Study Of Racial Ideology In The Era Of International Human Rights, Justin Desautels-Stein

Publications

There is no critical race approach to international law. There are Third World approaches, feminist approaches, economic approaches, and constitutional approaches, but notably absent in the catalogue is a distinct view of international law that takes its point of departure from the vantage of Critical Race Theory (CRT), or anything like it. Through a study of racial ideology in the history of international legal thought, this Article offers the beginnings of an explanation for how this lack of attention to race and racism came to be, and why it matters today.

Getting Past The Imperial Presidency, Deborah Pearlstein

Articles

In an age in which the “imperial presidency” seems to have reached its apex, perhaps most alarmingly surrounding the use of military force, conventional wisdom remains fixed that constitutional and international law play a negligible role in constraining executive branch decision-making in this realm. Yet as this Article explains, the factual case that supports the conventional view, based largely on highly selected incidents of presidential behavior, is meaningless in any standard empirical sense. Indeed, the canonical listing of presidential decisions to use force without prior authorization feeds a compliance-centered focus on the study of legal constraint rooted in long-since abandoned …

Human Rights Racism, Anna Spain Bradley

Publications

International human rights law seeks to eliminate racial discrimination in the world through treaties that bind and norms that transform. Yet law’s impact on eradicating racism has not matched its intent. Racism, in all of its forms, remains a massive cause of discrimination, indignity, and lack of equality for millions of people in the world today. This Article investigates why. Applying a critical race theory analysis of the legal history and doctrinal development of race and racism in international law, Professor Spain Bradley identifies law’s historical preference for framing legal protections around the concept of racial discrimination. She further exposes …

International Legal Structuralism: A Primer, Justin Desautels-Stein

Publications

International legal structuralism arrived on the shores of international thought in the 1980s. The arrival was not well-received, perhaps in part, because it was not well-understood. This essay aims to reintroduce legal structuralism and hopefully pave the way for new, and more positive, receptions and understandings. This reintroduction is organized around two claims regarding the broader encounter between international lawyers and critical theory in the ‘80s. The first was a jurisprudential claim about how the critics sought to show how international law was nothing more than a continuation of international politics by other means. The second was a historical claim …

Wächter, Carl Georg Von, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Carl Georg von Wächter (1797-1880) was once considered 'one of the greatest German jurists of all times’, but was all but forgotten in the 20th century, despite an excellent dissertation on his work in private international law by Nikolaus Sandmann. In private international law, he is known mainly for his critique of earlier theories, in particular the theory of statutes. Positively, Wächter is mainly (and not accurately) known as a proponent of a strong preference for the lex fori and as such mainly presented in opposition to Friedrich Carl von Savigny’s theory (Savigny, Friedrich Carl von). Only recently has there …

An Other History Of Knowledge And Decision In Precautionary Approaches To Sustainability, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay

Saptarishi Bandopadhyay

In this paper, I offer an alternative reading of precaution with the hope of recovering the capacity of this ethic to facilitate legal and political decisions. Despite being a popular instrument of international environmental governance, decision-makers continue to understand this principle as reflecting an immemorial and natural instinct for preserving the environment in cases of scientific uncertainty. Such a reading, however, ignores the history and moral basis underlying this principle and thereby renders it obvious, and automatically adaptable to the politics of Sustainable Development. By offering a thicker history of precautionary governance at exemplary moments of ecological crisis I trace …

The (Re-) Constitution Of The Public, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article deals with the prospect of public law in global governance. It analyses firstly the foundations of modern public law and considers what is left of them in the global setting. Are they still holding through States’ de-centering practices, detached from the legitimating grounds of the modern ‘idea of publicness’? What is called here the duality of public law (in its State-related political and juridical strands) fades and decouples in the sphere where inherently ‘global’ legalities originate of a deracinated type: the distinctively global ‘public’ only provides a ‘suspended public law’ and politically unsaturated. The Constitution of the Public …

Legal Mechanization Of Corporate Social Responsibility Through Alien Tort Statute Litigation: A Response To Professor Branson With Some Supplemental Thoughts, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

This Response argues that as ATS jurisprudence “matures” or becomes more sophisticated, the legitimate limits of the law regress. The further expansion within the corporate defendant pool – attempting to pin liability on parent, great grandparent corporations and up to the top – raises the stakes and complexity of ATS litigation. The corporate social responsibility discussion raises three principal issues about how a moral corporation lives its life: how a corporation chooses its self-interest versus the interests of others, when and how it should help others if control decisions may harm the shareholder owners, and how far the corporation must …

The Rule Of Law In Global Governance: Its Normative Construction, Function And Import, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

What does the Rule of law contribute in the frame of global governance? While addressing metamorphoses of law and the multiple legalities in the global context, this paper shows that the rule of law can consistently be extended externally being cherished internally. It takes seriously the concurrence of different legalities in their diverse ‘formats’, and the challenge of the “global administrative law” theoretical and empirical model. At the meta-level of the relations among legalities, the Rule of law has an essential role to play: it affects interactions and interdependence,and can cause content-dependent assessments to develop, without supporting self-closure or monistic …

The Relation Of Theories Of Jurisprudence To International Politics And Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

In this essay we shall be concerned with the real world relevance of theories of international law; that is, with the question of the theories themselves as a factor in international decision-making. To do this it is first necessary to review briefly the substance of the jurisprudential debate among legal scholars, then to view some basic jurisprudential ideas as factors in international views of "law," and finally to reach the question of the operative difference a study of these theories might make in world politics.

Fundamental Norms, International Law, And The Extraterritorial Constitution, Jules Lobel

Articles

The Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, decisively rejected the Bush Administration's argument that the Constitution does not apply to aliens detained by the United States government abroad. However, the functional, practicality focused test articulated in Boumediene to determine when the constitution applies extraterritorially is in considerable tension with the fundamental norms jurisprudence that underlies and pervades the Court’s opinion. This Article seeks to reintegrate Boumediene's fundamental norms jurisprudence into its functional test, arguing that the functional test for extraterritorial application of habeas rights should be informed by fundamental norms of international law. The Article argues that utilizing international law’s …

Una Aproximación Al Debate Democrático En Derecho Internacional, Ignacio De La Rasilla Del Moral

Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral, Ph.D.

Taking as it starting point a critical introduction to the democratic debate in international law, the object of the present work is that of contributing to the critical development of an appropiate methodology for the exam of the normative pretension according to which the international legal order would be developing within itself a particular conception of the liberal State. Such a conception would be premised in the gradual emergence of an international legal obligation that would command the development within every sovereign state of institutions of democratic governance, thus marking the transition from the paradigm of equivalence of domestic political …

Global Threads: Weaving The Rule Of Law And The Balance Of Legal Software, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

The article shows how the global legal sphere attempts to compensate the lack of a system (hardware) and faces the proliferation of legal normativities (software). The author elaborates on the role of the rule of law: after stressing the ambiguities and the contestability of its current uses in the confrontations between legal orders and regulatory regimes, it is explained that the persistence and promise of the rule of law in the global setting depend on the weaving of a set of meta-rules (a special kind of software) developed through various areas and sources of legalities in the international environment. Eventually, …

Voices Saved From Vanishing, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

Jurists Uprooted: German-speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth-century Britain examines the lives of eighteen émigré lawyers and legal scholars who made their way to the United Kingdom, almost all to escape Nazism, and analyzes their impact on the development of English law.

The Rule Of Law, Democracy, And International Law - Learning From The Us Experience, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

The general issue addressed in this paper is the relation between the rule of law as a matter of national law, and as a matter of international law. Different institutional conceptions of this relationship give rise to different attitudes towards international law. Nonetheless, questions arise that cast doubt on age-old tenets of certain Western countries concerning the radical separability between the rule of law within the domestic system and in the international realm. The article will start considering some recent developments in the United States' treatment of alien detainees. Then it shall address the relation between domestic constitutions and international …

Remarks By An Idealist On The Realism Of 'The Limits Of International Law', Kenneth Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This paper is a response to Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, 'The Limits of International Law' (Oxford 2005), part of a symposium on the book held at the University of Georgia Law School in October 2005. The review views 'The Limits of International Law' sympathetically, and focuses on the intersection between traditional and new methodologies of international law scholarship, on the one hand, and the substantive political commitments that differing international law scholars hold, on the other. The paper notes that some in the symposium claim that the problem with 'The Limits of International Law' is that it …

Rättens Ordning I Den Tid Som Återstår, Matilda Arvidsson

Dr Matilda Arvidsson

The article investigates the fundamental concept of 'time' within the framework of the laws of war, using the War on Terrorism as a starting point and the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq as an example. The article argues for an eschatological understanding of time during the War on Terrorism, framing a state of exception, and ultimately keeping law on hold in an enduring 'now' while messianic hopes for redemption are directed towards a new future to come after war.

Sovereignty And The American Courts At The Cocktail Party Of International Law: The Dangers Of Domestic Invocations Of Foreign And International Law, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

With increasing frequency and heightened debate, United States courts have been citing foreign and “international” law as authority for domestic decisions. This trend is inappropriate, undemocratic, and dangerous. The trend touches on fundamental concepts of sovereignty, democracy, the judicial role, and overall issues of effective governance. There are multiple problems with the judiciary’s reliance on extraterritorial and extra-constitutional foreign or international sources to guide their decisions. Perhaps the most fundamental flaw is its interference with rule of law values. To borrow from Judge Harold Levanthal, the use of international sources in judicial decision-making might be described as “the equivalent of …

Emote Control: The Substitution Of Symbol For Substance In Foreign Policy And International Law, Jules Lobel, George Loewenstein

Articles

Historical perspectives, as well as recent work in psychology, converge on the conclusion that human behavior is the product of two or more qualitatively different neural processes that operate according to different principles and often clash with one another. We describe a specific 'dual process' perspective that distinguishes between deliberative and emote control of behavior. We use this framework to shed light on a wide range of legal issues involving foreign policy, terrorism, and international law that are difficult to make sense of in terms of the traditional rational choice perspective. We argue that in these areas, the powerful influence …

Making Room For Critical Race Theory In International Law: Some Practical Pointers, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

In addition to assessing the pertinence of critical race theory in unmasking international law's colonial, racist and patriarchal underpinnings, this paper attempts to suggest practical ways in which a critical race theoryapproach can enrich the international legal system, by giving a voice to the voiceless and by addressing the conditions of marginality in which much of the developing world is trapped.

This paper will do three things. First, it will peruse the contemporary global situation with respect to international law and human rights. Second, it will assess the contribution of critical race theory in advancing an understanding of, and solution …

Constitutional Structure As A Limitation On The Scope Of The "Law Of Nations" In The Alien Tort Claims Act, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Jurisdiction matters. Outside of the set of jurisdictional constraints, the judiciary is at sea; it poses a threat to the separation of powers and risks becoming a dangerous and domineering branch. Jurisdictional limitations serve a particularly important function when the judiciary is dealing with issues of international law. Since much of international law concerns foreign relations, the province of the executive and, in part, the legislature, the danger that the judiciary will act in a policy-making role or will frustrate the functions of the political branches is especially great. The Framers of the Constitution were particularly concerned with constructing a …

A Contemporary Definition Of The International Norm Of Self-Determination, S. James Anaya

Publications

No abstract provided.

What 'Counts' As Law?, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

A reader of jurisprudence might conclude that only philosophers raise the question whether international law may be said to exist or is really law. But in terms of frequency, the question is probably raised more often by governments and states that are not trying to be philosophical. The increasing attention being paid to the need for, and the procedures for, objective validation of rules of international law in a burgeoning literature of international law evidences the seriousness of the problem, the responsibility of scholars for careful scholarship in this area of legal theory, and ultimately the good possibility of generally …

Book Review. Scott, J. B., Law, The State And The International Community, Jerome Hall

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.