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The Penalties For Piracy: An Empirical Study Of National Prosecution Of International Crime, Eugene Kontorovich Jan 2012

The Penalties For Piracy: An Empirical Study Of National Prosecution Of International Crime, Eugene Kontorovich

Faculty Working Papers

This Article examines the sentences imposed by courts around the world in prosecutions of Somali pirates captured on the high seas. Somali piracy has become perhaps the highest-volume area of international criminal law by national courts. As with other international crimes, international law is silent on the subject of penalties. The large number of parallel prosecutions of offenders from a single international "situation" offers an empirical window into the interactions between international and national law in municipal courts; into factors affecting punishment for international crimes and the hierarchy of international offenses; and of course into potential concerns with the current …


The Multiple Roles Of International Courts And Tribunals: Enforcement, Dispute Settlement, Constitutional And Administrative Review, Karen J. Alter Jan 2012

The Multiple Roles Of International Courts And Tribunals: Enforcement, Dispute Settlement, Constitutional And Administrative Review, Karen J. Alter

Faculty Working Papers

This chapter is part of an upcoming interdisciplinary volume on international law and politics. The chapter defines four judicial roles states have delegated to international courts (ICs) and documents the delegation of dispute settlement, administrative review, enforcement and constitutional review jurisdiction to ICs based on a coding of legal instruments defining the jurisdiction of 25 ICs. I show how the design of ICs varies by judicial role and argue that the delegation of multiple roles to ICs helps explain the shift in IC design to include compulsory jurisdiction and access for nonstate actors to initiate litigation. I am interested in …


Partisan Conflicts Over Presidential Authority, Jide Okechuku Nzelibe Jan 2011

Partisan Conflicts Over Presidential Authority, Jide Okechuku Nzelibe

Faculty Working Papers

A prevailing view in the legal and political science literature assumes that power holders seek to expand or contract their constitutional authority based on incentives that are intrinsic to the logic of the institutional offices they occupy. For instance, it is generally assumed that Presidents are empire builders who will almost always prefer maximum flexibility in shaping their policy objectives, whereas members of Congress may sometimes shirk their institutional prerogatives because of electoral incentives or collective action problems. A similar institutional logic underpins the view that federal courts will often seek to expand their interpretive authority in constitutional controversies at …


Whales: Their Emerging Right To Life, Anthony D'Amato, Sudhir K. Chopra Jan 2010

Whales: Their Emerging Right To Life, Anthony D'Amato, Sudhir K. Chopra

Faculty Working Papers

We have contended in this article that the evolution of the opinio juris of nations has encompassed five, and perhaps six, inexorable qualitative stages: free resource, regulation, conservation, protection, preservation and entitlement. We have argued that assigning whales an entitlement to life is the consequence of an emerging humanist right in international law — an example of the merging of the "is" and the "ought" of the law in the process of legitimization


Softness In International Law: A Self-Serving Quest For New Legal Materials: A Reply To Jean D’Aspremont,, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

Softness In International Law: A Self-Serving Quest For New Legal Materials: A Reply To Jean D’Aspremont,, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

As international law grows and spreads into non-traditional areas such as the international ecosystem, the global economy, and human rights, some say it is becoming fragmented. This notion can actually appeal to those scholars who want to become experts in a fragment without having the burden of connecting it to the rest of international law. Another group views the idea of isolated specialization with apprehension; they feel that international law is and must be a coherent set of principles and rules—coherent in the sense that no member of the set contradicts any other member. The burden of resolving the tension …


A Few Steps Toward An Explanatory Theory Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

A Few Steps Toward An Explanatory Theory Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

If any one sentence about international law has stood the test of time, it is Louis Henkin's: "almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time." If this is true, why is this true? What makes it true? How do nations invent rules that then turn around and bind them? Are international rules simply pragmatic and expedient? Or do they embody values such as the need for international cooperation? Is international law a mixed game of conflict and cooperation because of its rules, or do its rules make …


Is International Law Really ‘Law’?, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

Is International Law Really ‘Law’?, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

International law is enforced by the process I describe as reciprocal-entitlement violation. The violation may be of the same entitlement or, more likely, of a different entitlement. But it is on the whole an effective process—as effective for the international legal system as is the enforcement of most laws in domestic systems via the state-sanctioned deprivation of one or more entitlements held by individual citizens or corporations. It is impossible to understand why nations do or refrain from doing the things they do without understanding what the entitlements are and how nations act to preserve their full complement of existing …


International Law And Rawls' Theory Of Justice, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

International Law And Rawls' Theory Of Justice, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

The complexity of present-day international law stands in an uneasy relation to the scheme of justice propounded by Rawls. The problems facing international lawyers may pose a conceptual threat to some of the fundamental bases upon which Rawls builds his entire theoretical edifice.


Is International Law Part Of Natural Law?, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

Is International Law Part Of Natural Law?, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

The affinity of international law to natural law goes back a long way to the classic writers of international law. "Natural law" is the method of dispute resolution based on a conscious attempt to perpetuate past similarities in dispute resolution. "International law" has a deep affinity to this natural law method, for it consists of those practices that have "worked" in inter-nation conflict resolution.


There Is No Norm Of Intervention Or Non-Intervention In International Law, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

There Is No Norm Of Intervention Or Non-Intervention In International Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Comments on Prof. Jianming Shen's position that humanitarian intervention is unlawful under international law and that there is a principle of non-intervention in international law that is so powerful that it amounts to a jus cogens prohibition.


Human Rights As Part Of Customary International Law:A Plea For Change Of Paradigms, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

Human Rights As Part Of Customary International Law:A Plea For Change Of Paradigms, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

The question for us international lawyers is how, and how much of, public sentiment for human rights has been transformed into binding international law.


The Coerciveness Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

The Coerciveness Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

This article shows that an important part of the deep structure of international law is its self-referential strategy of employing its own rules to protect its rules. International law tolerates a principled violation of its own rules when necessary to keep other rules from being broken. It extends a legal privilege to states to use coercion against any state that has selfishly attempted to transgress its international obligations. International law thus protects itself through the opportunistic deployment of its own rules.


The Moral And Legal Basis For Sanctions, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

The Moral And Legal Basis For Sanctions, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

In order to analyze the moral and legal basis for sanctions in international relations, we have to begin at a stage where there is no centralized government in place. We first need to get a picture of the range of possible sanctions. Next, we need to see what role sanctions play in the international system. Finally, we turn to the intertwined moral and legal considerations that make well-designed sanctions efficacious in today's world. The fundamental objective of sanctions in interstate relations is to make it expensive for a target state to refrain from doing what the sanctioning state wants it …


The Path Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

The Path Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Is there a need for yet another student-edited international law journal? Practicing attorneys retrieve relevant articles when working on cases with international law issues, although they may be oblivious to the name of the journal or the prestige of the law school that supports it. For student editors, serving on a new international law journal is not just an intellectual experience; it is an empowering one. The more one looks into custom and treaty and the other sources of international law, the more one finds complexity and intellectual challenge.


Strategic Globalization: International Law As An Extension Of Domestic Political Conflict, Jide Nzelibe Jan 2010

Strategic Globalization: International Law As An Extension Of Domestic Political Conflict, Jide Nzelibe

Faculty Working Papers

Traditional accounts in both the international law and international relations literature largely assume that great powers like the United States enter into international legal commitments in order to resolve global cooperative problems or to advance objective state interests. Contrary to these accounts, this Article suggests that an incumbent regime (or partisan elites within the regime) may often seek to use international legal commitments to overcome domestic obstacles to their narrow policy and electoral objectives. In this picture, an incumbent regime may deploy international law to expand the geographical scope of political conflict across borders in order to isolate the domestic …


The Concept Of Special Custom In International Law, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2010

The Concept Of Special Custom In International Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

General customary international law contains rules, norms, and principles that seem applicable to any state and not to a particular state or an exclusive grouping of states. For example, norms relating to the high seas, to airspace and outer space, to diplomatic immunities, to the rules of warfare, and so forth, apply equally to all states having occasion to be concerned with these areas. Similarly, the facts of a given case may suggest exclusively the application of general custom—such as cases concerning collision on the high seas between ships of different countries, cases involving general principles of international law, cases …


Why Is International Law Binding?, Anthony D'Amato Jan 2008

Why Is International Law Binding?, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Many writers believe that international law is precatory but not "binding" in the way domestic law is binding. Since international law derives from the practice of states, how is it that what states do becomes what they must do? How do we get bindingness or normativity out of empirical fact? We have to avoid the Humean fallacy of attempting to derive an ought from an is. Yet we can find in nature at least one norm that is compelling: the norm of survival. This norm is hardwired into our brains through evolution. It is also hardwired into the international legal …


Courting Genocide: The Unintended Effects Of Humanitarian Intervention, Jide Nzelibe Jan 2008

Courting Genocide: The Unintended Effects Of Humanitarian Intervention, Jide Nzelibe

Faculty Working Papers

Invoking memories and imagery from the Holocaust and other German atrocities during World War II, many contemporary commentators and politicians believe that the international community has an affirmative obligation to deter and incapacitate perpetrators of humanitarian atrocities. Today, the received wisdom is that a legalistic approach, which combines humanitarian interventions with international criminal prosecutions targeting perpetrators, will help realize the post-World War II vision of making atrocities a crime of the past. This Article argues, in contrast, that humanitarian interventions are often likely to create unintended, and sometimes perverse, incentives among both the victims and perpetrators of atrocities. The problem …


Vietnam And Public International Law, Anthony D'Amato Jan 1969

Vietnam And Public International Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

With each international crisis inevitably come the self­styled "realists" proclaiming that there is no such thing as public international law. The Vietnam war is no exception, although here, due to the unusual complexity of the facts and the controversy over the applicable rules of international law, many of the published replies to the "realist's" positions have themselves been insubstantial and unconvincing. Let us look first, briefly, at the arguments of one of the realists, and then, with equal brevity, at some of the counterclaims. The remainder of this comment will be addressed to the larger issues involved and some suggested …


War Crimes And Vietnam: The "Nuremberg Defense" And The Military Service Resister, Anthony D'Amato, Harvey . L. Gould, Larry D. Woods Jan 1969

War Crimes And Vietnam: The "Nuremberg Defense" And The Military Service Resister, Anthony D'Amato, Harvey . L. Gould, Larry D. Woods

Faculty Working Papers

We have attempted to establish first that the international laws of warfare are part of American law, and have argued that these laws, when taken as prohibitions of specific methods of waging war, are a practical and effective means of controlling unnecessary suffering and destruction. Second, we have analyzed these laws as they apply to treatment of prisoners of war, aerial bombardment of nonmilitary targets, and chemical and biological warfare, and have marshalled a portion of the available evidence that American forces commit war crimes in Vietnam. Third, we have discussed the defenses of tu quoque, reprisal, military necessity, superior …


Legal Aspects Of The French Nuclear Tests, Anthony D'Amato Jan 1967

Legal Aspects Of The French Nuclear Tests, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Even at the level of scholarly or diplomatic argumentation it is important to inquire into the competing interests and legal factors involved in the atmospheric tests. This is true not only because differing political expectations or even measures might depend on the consensus as to the legality or illegality of the French tests, but also because the precedential value of the tests will be of greater or less force depending upon whether there is agreement at the time of the tests that France was or was not acting within her international legal rights.


The Inductive Approach Revisited, Anthony D'Amato Jan 1966

The Inductive Approach Revisited, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

A significant theoretical dispute has opened between Schwarzenberger and Jenks over the former's inductive approach to international law. At least three questions may be asked of the debate between Schwarzenberger and Jenks: (1) Is the inductive method inherently limited in its usefulness? (2) Given the use of an inductive approach, is there any room left for creativity in international law? (3) More basically, is Schwarzenberger's self-styled inductive approach really inductive?


The Neo-Positivist Concept Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato Jan 1965

The Neo-Positivist Concept Of International Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

The question "Is international law really law?" has not proved troublesome, according to Hart, because "a trivial question about the meaning of words has been mistaken for a serious question about the nature of things." Hart defends international law in Bentham's terms as "sufficiently analogous" to municipal law. It is important to see in what way this analogy is viewed by Hart in order to determine whether the reasoning he offers is too high a price to pay for accepting a neo-positivist into the circle of those who hold that international law is really law.