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8th Annual Alexander C. Cushing International Law Conference, Stockton Center For International Law

Cushing International Law Conference

Conflict at Sea
Seoul, Republic of Korea | 8-9 June 2026   The Stockton Center for International Law, in partnership with the Korea Institute for Maritime Strategy (KIMS), hosted the 8th Annual Alexander C. Cushing International Law Conference, Conflict at Sea, in Seoul, Republic of Korea, on 8-9 June 2026. The conference brought together military leaders, government officials, legal advisers, policymakers, and scholars to examine emerging challenges in maritime security and international law.

The conference attracted approximately 80 participants, including 40 registrants and 40 speakers, representing 10 countries, with significant participation from the Republic of Korea Navy and regional maritime-security …

Can – And Should – The Un Charter Be Saved?, Steven Ratner

Articles

World leaders from Canada’s Mark Carney to Germany’s Friedrich Merz have announced the demise of the international rules that provided some degree of order to international relations since the Second World War.2 The immediate cause is clear to them and others – a seeming abandonment of international law, and the UN Charter in particular, by the United States government, its chief architect and advocate. The U.S. actions and rhetoric over Venezuela and Iran – wars the United States has started – as well as Greenland and Ukraine seem to have confirmed the worst about the future of international law.

The Special International Peace Zone: From History, Through Practice, Toward An End To Armed Conflict In Ukraine, Tom W. Bell

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

This paper presents the special international peace zone as both an observed and ideal institution. Such a zone quells military conflict in an area over which sovereigns make conflicting territorial claims. It operates through an interim administration, governed by its own rules, independent of any single sovereign. Past examples include the Free City of Danzig (1920-39), the Free Territory of Trieste (1947-54), and United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (1999-2008). Despite proven successes, these zones have suffered from an undue reliance on multi-national organizations—first the League of Nations and now the United Nations. Warring sovereigns seldom agree about the …

The Increasing Prevalence Of Cyber Operations And The Inadequacy Of International Law To Address Them, Gabriel Smedes

Global Tides

This paper is a synthesis research article analyzing the legality of cyber operations within the international legal sphere. It works to define cyber operations and differentiate them from similar identifiers. The study looks to existing contributions to international law and explores how some existing some existing regulation is challenging to apply and it is difficult to implement new legislation. Highlighting the importance of legislation and regulations on cyber operations due to their increasing prevalence and danger.

The 3rd Annual Alexander C. Cushing International Law Conference: "Rule Of Law In The Indo-Pacific Region And Beyond", Stockton Center For International Law

Cushing International Law Conference

Hosted annually by the Stockton Center for International Law, the Alexander C. Cushing International Law Conference brings together scholars and practitioners from across the world to develop and shape international maritime law and governance. This year, we will focus on the rule of law and great power competition in the Indo-Pacific region and the Arctic Ocean, as well as exploring climate change and illegal fishing.

• Event | 3rd Annual Alexander C. Cushing International Law Conference: "Rule of Law in the Indo-Pacific Region and Beyond"
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For Whom Is International Law?, E. Tendayi Achiume

American University International Law Review

Grotius Lecturer E. Tendayi Achiume and Distinguished Discussant Jamil Dakwar provided the Twenty-Seventh Annual Grotius Lecture on Wednesday, April 16, 2025 at 5:00 p.m.

Data Injustice In Global Justice, Asaf Lubin, Cherry Tang

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In May 2020, the United Nations Secretary-General unveiled a sweeping “Data Strategy for Action by Everyone, Everywhere,” seeking to unlock the UN’s “full data potential.” The International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor followed suit, declaring in 2023 its intent to acquire advanced cyber forensic tools so as to hold the “widest range of digital evidence globally.” Across international institutions, data-driven governance has become the norm, with humanitarian agencies and tribunals transforming into “data hubs and information clearinghouses.” This Article critiques the unfettered datafication of global justice by international courts and organizations. These entities have aggressively expanded their data-driven operations …

Contested Criminalization, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

How does the U.S. government decide to deploy criminal justice abroad? From the Syrian civil war to the Israel-Gaza conflict, Russia-Ukraine War, and U.S.-China relations, criminal law sits at the heart of contemporary U.S. foreign relations. And yet legal scholarship has never precisely explained how the U.S. government deploys or supports criminal prosecutions abroad, often defaulting to simplistic labels of the United States as exceptionalist, carceral, or isolationist. This Article rectifies this by introducing a theory of contested criminalization, piercing the veil of U.S. government decisionmaking in its use of criminal law in foreign policy. According to this process, …

Confronting The War On International Law In The United States, Rebecca Ingber

Online Publications

Harold Hongju Koh’s The National Security Constitution in the 21st Century is a code red threat assessment of the state of public law in America today. True to Koh’s nature, he does not leave us without hope; rather he devotes a sizeable portion of the book to calls for reform, from the legal frameworks governing war powers and intelligence to the division of labor in the national security legal bureaucracy plodding away within the deepest (secure) chambers of the executive branch itself.

A Special Operations Approach To Lawfare, Justin Malzac

Naval War College Review

Adapting special operations forces concepts such as “preparation of the environment” and “by, with, and through” approaches to partners to the field of lawfare will help standardize lawfare practices and doctrine across the U.S. government and ensure necessary international legal foundations and norms are in place before a looming conflict begins.

Conceptualizing An International Framework For Active Private Cyber Defence, Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

Private sector cyber defence mechanisms are emerging despite existing legislation outlawing use of active defence by individuals and non-state entities. Thus, a key window exists for policy-makers in the possibility of establishing a framework for existing APCD practices that would enable optimal utilisation of private sector capabilities for securing cyber-space at an organizational and national level. This must happen in consonance with circumscribing their operations within the boundaries of the rule of law, both in terms of domestic legislation and international law. This paper seeks to unpack the complexities that underscore each of these challenges and identify avenues towards resolving …

Embodied Ecologies And Legal Wars: The Use Of Force, Ukraine, And Feminist Perspectives On International Law, Gina Heathcote

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In this article, I examine the international law on the use of force alongside a feminist analysis of the ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine. I draw on records of mushroom foraging to evidence how everyday practices of communities are destroyed by military aggression that disrupts the embodied ecologies reproduced in intergenerational human and nonhuman encounters. The mushrooms foraged in Ukraine, the mushrooms destroyed during military encounters, and the mushrooms growing beside land mines provide an aperture for shifting both feminist and international legal accounts of armed conflict. I argue that ecologies of harm produce means to understand the gendered violence …

Ukraine, Nuclear Weapons, And The Future Of International Law, Nicholas Rostow

Naval War College Review

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has confronted the international community with fateful questions: whether the minimum world public order constructed after World War II is to survive, whether nuclear powers are free to commit aggression, and whether any state that is not an ally of a nuclear power is fair game for attack.

The Issue Of Enforcement In International Law: A Case Study Of The War In Ukraine, Luana M. Denegre

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to outline ways to enforce international law more effectively. Through the analysis of the current international legal framework and the different mechanisms created to enforce international law, it identifies why they are insufficient to enforce international law effectively, and it gives recommendations to ameliorate the way international law is currently enforced. This research focuses on the ongoing war in Ukraine as a case study, and provides specific examples of ways international law was grossly violated by Russia, a U.N. permanent Security Council member, in order to identify patterns in the non-enforcement of international law. To bridge the …

Operation Nation-Building: How International Humanitarian Law Left Afghanistan Open On The Operating Table, Nina Griscelli

University of Miami Law Review

Military campaigns often carry with them official names and underpinning objectives. In Afghanistan, these campaigns were known as Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001, and later, in 2015, as Operation Freedom Sentinel. In total, the United States and its allies remained in Afghan territory for 7,268 days, twenty years, in support of the “Global War on Terror.” Within that time, the democratic construction of a “free” Afghan society—also known as nation-building, regime change, or transformative military occupation—deeply transformed the status quo of the population. To the West, “Operation Nation-Building” became the most strategic and “hopeful alternative to the vision of the …

Untethering Umvs From Vessels: Why The United States Should Construct A New Environmental Legal Scheme For Unmanned Maritime Vehicles, Lindsay I. Mccarl

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

International and domestic laws and regulations, and in particular those addressing environmental protections related to the world’s oceans, have no clear application to unmanned maritime vehicles (UMVs). Instead, legal scholars have attempted to fit UMVs into current legal schemes in a piecemeal manner that UMVs practically and realistically cannot comply with. UMVs are inherently different than their manned counterparts and therefore require a unique legal framework separate and apart from manned vessels. Without its own legal scheme, the United States Navy and other organizations will not be able to realize the full potential of UMVs—not only for their military operational …

Ransomware Groups On Notice: U.S. Cyber Operation Against Revil Is Permissible Under International Law, Justin Singh

American University International Law Review

The continued increase in the use of ransomware by cyber criminals has had a costly impact on businesses and organizations around the world. Ransomware groups continue to initiate attacks on businesses and organizations, and states have become increasingly concerned over the potential impact it may have on their critical infrastructure and economies. The United States’ recent acknowledgement of cyber operations against ransomware groups highlights the seriousness of the issue and exposes areas of international law that are complicated when applied to cyber operations against these groups. This Comment explores the relevant international law as it applies to the United States …

The Law And Politics Of Ransomware, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

What do Lady Gaga, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, the city of Valdez in Alaska, and the court system of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul all have in common? They have all been victims of ransomware attacks, which are growing both in number and severity. In 2016, hackers perpetrated roughly four thousand ransomware attacks a day worldwide, a figure which was already alarming. By 2020, however, ransomware attacks reached a staggering number, between 20,000 and 30,000 per day in the United States alone. That is a ransomware attack every eleven seconds, each of which cost victims …

Understating The Double-Standard On The Use Of Force, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

In the days following the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, (1) international law organization leaders issued unprecedented statements of condemnation. (2) No other world event has led to so many consistent expressions from these groups respecting a violation of international law. The occasion merited the response. Russia's invasion was only the second time a member of the United Nations has attempted to conquer and eliminate another UN member since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945. The first time was in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. (3) At that time, the world …

National Security Policymaking In The Shadow Of International Law, Laura T. Dickinson

Utah Law Review

Scholars have long debated whether and how international law impacts governmental behavior, even in the absence of coercive sanction. But this literature does not sufficiently address the possible impact of international law in the area of national security policymaking. Yet, policies that the executive branch purports to adopt as a wholly discretionary matter may still be heavily influenced by international legal norms, regardless of whether or not those norms are formally recognized as legally binding. And those policies can be surprisingly resilient, even in subsequent administrations. Moreover, because they are only seen as discretionary policies, they may be more easily …

Policy Proposals For The United States To Protect The Undersea Cable System, Kevin Frazier

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

The protection of the undersea cable system, which carries the vast majority of the world’s Internet traffic, requires a new policy approach from the United States government. Old vulnerabilities and new threats have placed this critical piece of international infrastructure under increased threat of disruption and sabotage. Old vulnerabilities include the inherent difficulties associated with defending cables that lay along the open seafloor across international waters and the fragility of the cables themselves--often no larger than a garden hose. New threats come from climate change and changes in geopolitics. For example, Russia, among other nations, has made investments in offensive …

Self-Defense To Cyber Force: Combatting The Notion Of 'Scale And Effect', Thomas Eaton

Scholarly Works

The ability to reach out, with a few keystrokes or a couple lines of code, through the interconnected world of cyberspace and create militarily advantageous effects 10,000 miles away has changed warfare as previously conceived, perhaps more than any other advancement in any other domain of war. Cyber weapons are weapons, and whatever law applies to conventional weapons equally applies to cyber weapons. Long before cyber operations were even science fiction, there was much debate over what constituted a use of force that would justify force in response. In many ways, the debate over what constitutes cyber-attacks has been pasted …

Toolkit Or Tinderbox? When Legal Systems Interface Conflict, Christie S. Warren

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Social Contract Theory And Transitional Justice: A Philosophical Approach To A Problem Of Global Importance, Brendan Moriarty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I seek to bring together two areas of scholarly work to see how each can inform the other: social contract theory and transitional justice. The social contract, as it exists and as it was theorized about by Rousseau, was born from the world-historic forces that spread capitalism across the globe, stirring up nationalism everywhere it went. In its wake, there was vast inequality and new legal regimes which protected the hoarded wealth of the capitalist class by enshrining the right of private property along with life and liberty. To examine the intricacies of transitional justice and its …

Election Hacking: A Trifecta Of Sovereignty, Intervention, And Use Of Force Violations In International Law, Arlen Printz

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

70 Years Of The International Law Commission, Its Future Role In The Changing Landscape Of International Law And The Small-Developing States Nexus, Michael Imran Kanu

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Internal Morality Of International Law, Evan Fox-Decent, Evan J. Criddle

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Increasing International Legal Protections For Freedom Of Expression, Alan Wehbé

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

The international community seems to largely agree on the fundamental nature of the freedom of expression. Even countries that do not seem, in practice, to respect the freedom of expression still tend to ratify, sign, or be party to international instruments to that end. This duality tends to simplify the legal argument, but complicate the actual practice for promoting freedom of expression worldwide. For those who agree that the United States is a leader in international affairs, shift towards a more definitive State practice reinforcing the freedom of expression is an easy sell. For those who dispute whether the United …

The Contributions Of United Nations Security Council Resolutions To The Law Of Non-International Armed Conflict: New Evidence Of Customary International Law, Gregory H. Fox, Isaac Jenkins, Kristen E. Boon

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Promoting International Cybersecurity Cooperation: Lessons From The Proliferation Security Initiative, Duncan B. Hollis, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

Global efforts by states to cooperate through international rules in combating cyber threats have generated mixed results, at best. In this paper, we examine the architecture of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) as a possible model for future cybersecurity cooperation among interested states. We identify several features of PSI’s architecture (rather than its substantive focus on non-proliferation) for further analysis, including PSI’s low entry costs, tiered structure, and flexibility, as well as its leveraging of both territorial jurisdiction and state consent. We conclude that, despite several hurdles visible in the scope of its membership and its legal framework, PSI still …