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Jurisdiction, Immunity, Legality, And Jus Cogens, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Immunities in international law expose multifaceted tensions between goals of international stability and legal accountability. This Article seeks to clarify the law in this area by providing conceptual and doctrinal coherence to relationships between immunity and jurisdiction. It first explains that foreign sovereign immunity and official status-based immunity are jurisdictional in that they block the exercise of adjudicative jurisdiction by foreign states’ courts. The Article then explains that these immunities do not block the prescriptive jurisdiction of foreign states’ laws to regulate conduct, even conduct inside other states, if a basis of prescriptive jurisdiction exists in international law.

The Article …