Law Commons^™

A Hague Parallel Proceedings Convention: Architecture And Features, Paul Herrup, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

In Paul Herrup and Ronald A. Brand, A Hague Convention on Parallel Proceedings, 63 Harvard International Law Journal Online 1(2022), available at https://harvardilj.org/2022/02/a-hague-convention-on-parallel-proceedings/ and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3894502, we argued that the Hague Conference on Private International Law should not undertake a project to require or prohibit exercise of original jurisdiction in national courts. Rather, the goal of current efforts should be to improve the concentration of parallel litigation in a “better forum,” in order to achieve efficient and complete resolution of disputes in transnational litigation. The Hague Conference is now taking this path. As the Experts Group and Working Group …

Domestic Courts And The Generation Of Norms In International Law, Charles T. Kotoby Jr.

Articles

International law in the form of treaty and custom is primarily shaped by national executives and legislatures. To be sure, “judicial decisions” are deemed a “subsidiary means for the determination of [international] law,” but that still does not give domestic courts an everyday role in the generation of universal norms and international law. This article proposes a more dynamic reality which elevates the importance of municipal courts in the generation and creation of international law. The truth is that domestic courts interact regularly to announce and create important universal norms—by, for instance, adjudicating expropriation claims, passing on the recognition and …

Strengthening The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Pathways For Bridging Law And Policy, Columbia Law School, 2020, Nobuhisa Ishizuka, Masahiro Kurosaki, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

During the three years leading up to this year ’s 60th anniversary of the signing of the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, a series of workshops were held under the joint sponsorship of Columbia Law School’s Center for Japanese Legal Studies and the National Defense Academy of Japan’s Center for Global Security. Bringing together experts in international law and political science primarily from the United States and Japan, the workshops examined how differing approaches to use of force and understandings of individual and collective self-defense in the two countries might adversely affect their alliance.

The workshop participants explored the underlying causes …

Rulers Or Rules? International Law, Elite Cues And Public Opinion, Anton Strezhnev, Beth A. Simmons, Matthew D. Kim

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the mechanisms by which international law can shape domestic politics is through its effects on public opinion. However, a growing number of national leaders have begun to advocate policies that ignore or even deny international law constraints. This article investigates whether international law messages can still shift public opinion even in the face of countervailing elite cues. It reports results from survey experiments conducted in three countries, the United States, Australia and India, which examined attitudes on a highly salient domestic political issue: restrictions on refugee admissions. In each experimental vignette, respondents were asked about their opinion on …

Do Self-Reporting Regimes Matter? Evidence From The Convention Against Torture, Beth A. Simmons, Cosette D. Creamer

All Faculty Scholarship

International regulatory agreements depend largely on self-reporting for implementation, yet we know almost nothing about whether or how such mechanisms work. We theorize that self-reporting processes provide information for domestic constituencies, with the potential to create pressure for better compliance. Using original data on state reports submitted to the Committee Against Torture, we demonstrate the influence of this process on the pervasiveness of torture and inhumane treatment. We illustrate the power of self-reporting regimes to mobilize domestic politics through evidence of civil society participation in shadow reporting, media attention, and legislative activity around anti-torture law and practice. This is the …

The Dynamic Impact Of Periodic Review On Women’S Rights, Cosette D. Creamer, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

Human rights treaty bodies have been frequently criticized as useless and the regime’s self-reporting procedure widely viewed as a whitewash. Yet very little research explores what, if any, influence this periodic review process has on governments’ implementation of and compliance with treaty obligations. We argue oversight committees may play an important role in improving rights on the ground by providing information for international and primarily domestic audiences. This paper examines the cumulative effects on women’s rights of self-reporting and oversight review, using original data on the history of state reporting to and review by the Committee on the Elimination of …

International Lobbying Law, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

An idiosyncratic array of international rules allows nonstate actors to gain special access to international officials and lawmakers. Historically, many of these groups were public-interest associations like Amnesty International. For this reason, the access rules have been celebrated as a way to democratize international organizations, enhancing their legitimacy and that of the rules they produce. But a focus on the classic public-law virtues of democracy and legitimacy produces a theory at odds with the facts: The international rules rules also offer access to industry and trade associations like the World Coal Association, whose principal purpose is to lobby for their …

The International Criminal Court In Africa: Impartiality, Politics, Complementarity And Brexit, Bartram Brown

All Faculty Scholarship

I have known and been inspired by Henry J. Richardson III and his scholarship for many years. A hallmark of his work has been his focus upon African-American interests in international law and also upon the rights and interests of African states. In acknowledgement of that intellectual debt, it is my honor to dedicate the following article to this festschrift celebrating his life and work.

From Treaties To International Commitments: The Changing Landscape Of Foreign Relations Law, Jean Galbraith

All Faculty Scholarship

Sometimes the United States makes international commitments in the manner set forth in the Treaty Clause. But far more often it uses congressional-executive agreements, sole executive agreements, and soft law commitments. Foreign relations law scholars typically approach these other processes from the perspective of constitutional law, seeking to determine the extent to which they are constitutionally permissible. In contrast, this Article situates the myriad ways in which the United States enters into international commitments as the product not only of constitutional law, but also of international law and administrative law. Drawing on all three strands of law provides a rich …

Framing For A New Transnational Legal Order: The Case Of Human Trafficking, Paulette Lloyd, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

How does transnational legal order emerge, develop and solidify? This chapter focuses on how and why actors come to define an issue as one requiring transnational legal intervention of a specific kind. Specifically, we focus on how and why states have increasingly constructed and acceded to international legal norms relating to human trafficking. Empirically, human trafficking has been on the international and transnational agenda for nearly a century. However, relatively recently – and fairly swiftly in the 2000s – governments have committed themselves to criminalize human trafficking in international as well as regional and domestic law. Our paper tries to …

What Is Extraterritorial Jurisdiction?, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The phenomenon of extraterritorial jurisdiction, or the exercise of legal power beyond territorial borders, presents lawyers, courts, and scholars with analytical onions comprising layers of national and international legal issues; as each layer peels away, more issues are revealed. U.S. courts, including the Supreme Court, have increasingly been wrestling this conceptual and doctrinal Hydra. Any legal analysis of extraterritorial jurisdiction leans heavily on the answers to two key definitional questions: What do we mean by “extraterritorial”? And, what do we mean by “jurisdiction”? Because the answer to the first question is often conditional on the answer to the second, the …

Crimea And The International Legal Order, William W. Burke-White

All Faculty Scholarship

A key balance between two of the most fundamental principles of the post-World War II international legal and political order is at stake today in Ukraine. Particularly in its annexation of Crimea, Russia has exploited the tension between a fundamental principle that prohibits the acquisition of territory through the use of force and an equally fundamental right of self-determination. Russia’s reinterpretation of these two principles could well destabilize the tenuous balance between the protection of individual rights and the preservation of states’ territorial integrity that undergirds the post World War II order. In determining the precedent that will be remembered …

Of Civil Wrongs And Rights: Kiyemba V. Obama And The Meaning Of Freedom, Separation Of Powers, And The Rule Of Law Ten Years After 9/11, Katherine L. Vaughns, Heather L. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

This article is about the rise and fall of continued adherence to the rule of law, proper application of the separation of powers doctrine, and the meaning of freedom for a group of seventeen Uighurs—a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority whose members reside in the Xinjiang province of China—who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base since 2002. Most scholars regard the trilogy of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Boumediene v. Bush as demonstrating the Supreme Court’s willingness to uphold the rule of law during the war on terror. The recent experience of the Uighurs …

Of Law And The Revolution, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Egyptian revolution is proving to be a very legal one. That is not to say that the revolution’s demands have been legalized, nor that Egypt’s law has been revolutionized, rather, the forces that have come to the fore since the toppling of Mubarak in Feb 2011 have chosen law as the privileged form through which to bargain with each other. The density of the legal back and fro has been overwhelming: constitutional amendments, constitutional supplementary declarations, parliamentary laws, legislative amendments, military decrees, court trials, constitutional court decisions overturning laws passed, conflicting decisions from various courts, presidential decrees, emergency laws …

The United States' Use Of Drones In The War On Terror: The (Il)Legality Of Targeted Killings Under International Law, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States government began to use drones against al-Qaeda targets. According to several media reports, the United States developed two parallel drone programs: one operated by the military, and one operated in secrecy by the CIA. Under the Obama Administration, the latter program developed and- the number of drone attacks in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen has steadily increased. Because the drone program is operated covertly by the CIA, it has been impossible to determine the precise contours of the program, its legal and normative framework, and whether its operators …

From Rapists To Superpredators: What The Practice Of Capital Punishment Says About Race, Rights And The American Child, Robyn Linde

Faculty Publications

At the turn of the 20^th century, the United States was widely considered to be a world leader in matters of child protection and welfare, a reputation lost by the century’s end. This paper suggests that the United States’ loss of international esteem concerning child welfare was directly related to its practice of executing juvenile offenders. The paper analyzes why the United States continued to carry out the juvenile death penalty after the establishment of juvenile courts and other protections for child criminals. Two factors allowed the United States to continue the juvenile death penalty after most states in …

Notes In Defense Of The Iraq Constitution, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

This paper is a defense of sorts of the Iraqi constitution, arguing that the language used in it was wisely designed to allow some level of flexibility, such that highly divided political forces could find incremental solutions to the deep rooted sources of division that have plagued Iraqi society since its inception. That Iraq has found itself in such dreadful political circumstances since constitutional ratification is therefore not a function of the open ended constitutional bargain, but rather of the failure of Iraqi legal and political elites to make use of the space that the constitution provided them to develop …

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 …

Israel's Air Strike Upon The Iraqi Nuclear Reactor, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

The destructive potential of nuclear weapons is so enormous as to call into question any and all received rules of international law regarding the trans-boundary use of force. Many of the old rationales for these rules no longer apply. At the same time, the shared values underlying the rules apply more emphatically than ever, for the stake is global survival. I have tried to suggest some of the questions that must be asked about as apparently "simple" an incident as the Israeli attack on the nuclear reactor in Iraq.

International Law From A Machiavellian Perspective, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Machiavelli leaves one with both an optimistic and a pessimistic prognostication for the post-Cold War world. On the one hand, the end of that conflict has opened the way for the spread of liberal, constitutional regimes, which he would say are inclined to be more and more meticulous in honoring their commitments. On the other, the temptation to use force to create new facts and thereby force international law into new paths will remain as long as politics is practiced. The contemporary relevance of Machiavelli may be seen in that he urged both realities upon us. I focus on a …

The European Court’S Political Power Across Time And Space, Karen Alter

Faculty Working Papers

This article extracts from Alter's larger body of work insights on how the political and social context shapes the ECJ's political power and influence. Part I considers how the political context facilitated the constitutionalization of the European legal system. Part II considers how the political context helps determine where and when the current ECJ influences European politics. Part III draws lessons from the ECJ's experience, speculating on how the European context in specific allowed the ECJ to become such an exceptional international court. Part IV lays out a research agenda to investigate the larger question of how social support shapes …

Treaties And The Separation Of Powers In The United States: A Reassessment After Medellin V. Texas, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This article considers Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion in the case of Medellin v. Texas. Like much of the commentary on this case, the article considers the international law implications of the opinion and its consideration of the doctrine of self-executing treaties. The primary focus here, however, consistent with the symposium in which this paper was presented, is on the opinion's implications for the separation of powers and for federalism. While the opinion's discussion of international law and treaty implementation can be considered dicta, the separation of powers and federalism portions may be seen as more directly necessary to …

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.

Can Might Make Right? The Use Of Force To Impose Democracy And The Arthurian Dilemma In The Modern Era, Scott Thompson

Publications

This article explains that under international law nations are not permitted to use force to impose democracy on other nations and that such an approach is also impracticable and undesirable from a policy perspective.

Unratified Treaties, Domestic Politics, And The U.S. Constitution, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

Under contemporary treaty practice, a nation's signature of a treaty typically does not make the nation a party to the treaty. Rather, nations become parties to treaties through an act of ratification or accession, which sometimes occurs long after signature. Nevertheless, Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which many commentators regard as reflecting customary international law, provides that when a nation signs a treaty it is obligated to refrain from actions that would defeat the “object and purpose” of the treaty until such time as it makes clear its intent not to become a party …

Vote-Trading In International Institutions, Ofer Eldar

Faculty Scholarship

There is evidence that countries trade votes among each other in international institutions on a wide range of issues, including the use of force, trade issues and elections of judges. Vote-trading has been criticized as being a form of corruption, undue influence and coercion. Contrary to common wisdom, however, I argue in this paper that the case for introducing policy measures against vote-trading cannot be made out on the basis of available evidence. This paper sets out an analytical framework for analyzing vote-trading in international institutions, focusing on three major contexts in which vote-trading may generate benefits and costs: (1) …

Judicial Review And United States Supreme Court Citations To Foreign And International Law, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

Recent decisions by the United States Supreme Court and extracurricular discussions between some of the Justices have fueled a debate regarding whether and when it is appropriate for the Court to make reference to foreign law in cases involving the interpretation and application of the United States Constitution. This debate has, to some extent, paralleled the argument over whether the Constitution is best interpreted by looking at the intent of the original drafters - an originalist approach - or by considering it to be a "living" document that must be interpreted to take account of contemporary realities. This article considers …

Rule-Based Dispute Resolution In International Trade Law, Rachel Brewster

Faculty Scholarship

Why does the United States ever prefer to settle disputes under a system of rules rather than a system of negotiations? Powerful states are advantaged by negotiation-based approaches to settling disagreements because they have the resources to resolve individual disputes on favorable terms. By contrast, rule-based dispute resolution advantages weak states as a means to hold powerful states to the terms of their agreements. Then why did the United States want a rule-based system to settle international disputes in the WTO? To answer this question, we have to understand domestic politics as well as international politics. International constraints, particularly international …

Gendered Subjects Of Transitional Justice, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Transitional societies must contend with a range of complex challenges as they seek to come to terms with and move beyond an immediate past saturated with mass murder, rape, torture, exploitation, disappearance, displacement, starvation, and all other manner of human suffering. Questions of justice figure prominently in these transitional moments, and they do so in a dual fashion that is at once backward and forward looking. Successor governments must think creatively about building institutions that bring justice to the past, while at the same time demonstrate a commitment that justice will form a bedrock of governance in the present and …