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Full-Text Articles in Law

Unmuddying The Waters: Evaluating The Legal Basis Of The Human Right To Water Under Treaty Law, Customary International Law, And The General Principles Of Law, Ndjodi Ndeunyema Aug 2020

Unmuddying The Waters: Evaluating The Legal Basis Of The Human Right To Water Under Treaty Law, Customary International Law, And The General Principles Of Law, Ndjodi Ndeunyema

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article evaluates the existence of a freestanding, general human right to water under each of the three principal sources of international law: treaty, customary international law, and the general principles of law. To date, the right to water has been derived from treaty law, most prominently as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (as implied by General Comment 15 to the ICESCR). The potential importance of a non-treaty based right to water––as a matter of customary international law or a general principle …


Oil Under Troubled Waters?: Some Legal Aspects Of The Boundary Dispute Between Malawi And Tanzania Over Lake Malawi, Tiyanjana Maluwa Apr 2016

Oil Under Troubled Waters?: Some Legal Aspects Of The Boundary Dispute Between Malawi And Tanzania Over Lake Malawi, Tiyanjana Maluwa

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article examines the legal aspects of the respective claims by the two claimants to the northeastern stretches of the lake: to the eastern shoreline by Malawi and to the median line by Tanzania. Maluwa proceeds as follows. First, the Article sketches out the historical and political background of the dispute and examines some preliminary legal issues in Part I. Part II discusses the legal significance of boundaries, state succession to boundary treaties, and the relevance of post-colonial African state practice in this respect. A central aspect of this practice is the adoption by African states of the principle of …


Uncertainty, Precaution, And Adaptive Management In Wildlife Trade, Annecoos Wiersema Oct 2015

Uncertainty, Precaution, And Adaptive Management In Wildlife Trade, Annecoos Wiersema

Michigan Journal of International Law

Wildlife trade is big business. Legal international trade in just some of the wild animals and plants traded worldwide is estimated at $350 to $530 million per year. The United States is the primary importer of virtually every major taxon of these species, including mammals, reptiles, fish, and plants. When it comes to illegal trade, estimates of its value range from $7 to $23 billion annually, covering wild animals, fish, and timber. This illegal trade fuels organized crime and militia and terrorist groups. In the face of all this pressure, some wild species appear to be traded in sustainable amounts. …


Foreign Investment And Indigenous Peoples: Options For Promoting Equilibrium Between Economic Development And Indigenous Rights, George K. Foster Jun 2012

Foreign Investment And Indigenous Peoples: Options For Promoting Equilibrium Between Economic Development And Indigenous Rights, George K. Foster

Michigan Journal of International Law

The quotations above refer to distinct conflicts that are widely separated by time and geography but remarkably similar in other respects. The first describes events leading to the Black Hills War of 1876, in which the U.S. Army forced the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne onto reservations to make way for gold mining by non-Indians. The second describes a violent episode in a conflict between native groups and the Peruvian government, which began in 2009 when the government took steps to expand mining and oil operations by multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the Peruvian Amazon. In both cases, outside commercial interests …


Canada-United States Cooperative Approaches To Shared Marine Fishery Resources: Territorial Subversion?, Ted L. Mcdorman Jan 2009

Canada-United States Cooperative Approaches To Shared Marine Fishery Resources: Territorial Subversion?, Ted L. Mcdorman

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Essay will focus on how Canada and the United States have both succeeded and failed in adopting cooperative approaches to managing ocean fishery resources. A critical factor that has influenced these efforts is the introduction of an international legal construct dictating that States have exclusive sovereign rights respecting all marine living resources within 200 nautical miles of their shores. Cooperative approaches to managing transboundary marine living resources between Canada and the United States are necessary for two reasons. First, in the case of marine living resources, the resource pays scant attention to human-constructed national boundaries. Put another way, marine …


Conserving Marine Wildlife Through World Trade Law, Eric A. Bilsky Jan 2009

Conserving Marine Wildlife Through World Trade Law, Eric A. Bilsky

Michigan Journal of International Law

Part I of this Essay marshals the evidence that fisheries around the world are in peril from destructive fishing practices. Part II argues that most fisheries management regimes are ineffective at counteracting the political pressures and economic incentives that lead to unsustainable fishing. Part III makes the case that government subsidies are major enablers of overfishing. The fourth and final Part discusses the continuing efforts to use international trade regulation to eliminate overfishing subsidies and halt the collapse of the world's marine fish populations.


Assemblage-Oriented Ocean Resource Management: How The Marine Environment Washes Over Traditional Territorial Lines, John A. Duff Jan 2009

Assemblage-Oriented Ocean Resource Management: How The Marine Environment Washes Over Traditional Territorial Lines, John A. Duff

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Essay assesses challenges that arise when marine territorial boundaries do not encompass the appropriate assemblage of resources and relationships necessary for effective authority and management. It reviews the manner in which certain offshore resource uses have been "quasi-territorialized" by the application of other forms of jurisdiction. It also highlights regime-jurisdiction-private interest-oriented responses to territory-oriented challenges in the form of assemblages of authority, interests, space, and time. Given the scalar progression of the links in the discussion, the assessment moves from international principles to exercises of national sovereignty to domestic administration of space and resources to private legal interests.


Privatization And The Human Right To Water: Challenges For The New Century, Melina Williams Jan 2007

Privatization And The Human Right To Water: Challenges For The New Century, Melina Williams

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Note considers implications for the human fight to water in the context of the trend toward privatization of water supplies. Part II examines the legal bases of the right to water, and Part III discusses the potential obligations that arise from it. Part IV then looks at the interaction between the fight to water and arrangements to privatize water supplies. This Note posits that human rights law does not simply support or oppose privatization of water supplies and services. Rather, bringing a human rights perspective to the problem of providing water to the world's population both clarifies the minimum …


Inordinate Chill: Bits, Non-Nafta Mits, And Host-State Regulatory Freedom- An Indonesian Case Study, Stuart G. Gross Jan 2003

Inordinate Chill: Bits, Non-Nafta Mits, And Host-State Regulatory Freedom- An Indonesian Case Study, Stuart G. Gross

Michigan Journal of International Law

A number of structural factors, which are beyond the immediate scope of this Note, may influence less wealthy countries to cave in to investor threats of arbitration, as Indonesia appears to have done here. However, their hesitancy to fight may also be based, in part, on an inadequate understanding of the applicable law, which allows investors to inordinately influence host-State decisions through threats of arbitration that have little or no chance of success. In regard to the mining companies' threat, this at least appears to be the case. As this Note will demonstrate, the GOI could have likely beaten the …


Does The Emperor Have No Clothes? Enforcement Of International Laws Protecting The Marine Environment, David S, Ardia Jan 1998

Does The Emperor Have No Clothes? Enforcement Of International Laws Protecting The Marine Environment, David S, Ardia

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article examines existing structures and mechanisms for the enforcement of international environmental laws, particularly international laws that must confront violations on the high seas in order to protect marine organisms. Although the tenor of the present analysis is general, many of the most influential international marine agreements to date are highlighted, including the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, the Convention on Future Multilateral Co-Operation in the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries, and the United Nations Agreement on the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stock and Highly Migratory Fish Stock.


The International Convention To Combat Desertification: Drawing A Line In The Sand?, William C. Burns Jan 1995

The International Convention To Combat Desertification: Drawing A Line In The Sand?, William C. Burns

Michigan Journal of International Law

The purpose of this article is to assess the potential efficacy of the Convention in the face of devastation of the world's dryland resources. In this pursuit, I will: 1) Outline the causes and implications of desertification; 2) Present a brief history of past efforts to battle desertification; 3) Discuss the contours and the Convention; and 4) Assess the prospects for the Convention to make a meaningful difference in the struggle to save the world's land.


Renegotiating Transnational Investment Agreements: Lessons For Develping Countries From The Ghana-Valco Experience, Paul Kuruk Jan 1991

Renegotiating Transnational Investment Agreements: Lessons For Develping Countries From The Ghana-Valco Experience, Paul Kuruk

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article describes the use of the renegotiation process to resolve problems that arise in the relations between participants in transnational investment. It draws conclusions from the successful renegotiation of an agreement executed in 1962 under which the Ghanaian government guaranteed bauxite and hydroelectric power supplies to support the smelting operations of the Volta Aluminium Company, Limited (Valco) in return for revenues from taxes and from payments for electricity, water, and use of the country's port facilities. The agreement between Ghana and Valco was entered into as part of the Volta River Project (VRP). This project was an investment scheme …


The West Bank Aquifer And Conventions Regarding Laws Of Belligerent Occupation, Jamal L. El-Hindi Jan 1990

The West Bank Aquifer And Conventions Regarding Laws Of Belligerent Occupation, Jamal L. El-Hindi

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Note will provide an introductory analysis of the conventions on belligerent occupation as they apply to the West Bank aquifer. Part I provides a brief analysis of the current situation in the region. Part II provides an overview of the relevant conventions on belligerent occupation and then focuses on how these laws apply to underground water resources in the West Bank. Finally, Part III outlines potential developments for the maintenance of complicity with the developing law of belligerent occupation, taking into account developments in international water law.