Law Commons^™

Mandatory Multilateralism, Evan J. Criddle, Evan Fox-Decent

Faculty Publications

This Article challenges the conventional wisdom that states are always free to choose whether to participate in multilateral regimes. International law often mandates multilateralism to ensure that state laws and practices are compatible with sovereign equality and joint stewardship. The Article maps mandatory multilateralism's domain, defines its requirements, and examines its application to three controversies: the South China Sea dispute, the United States' withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement, and Bolivia's case against Chile in the International Court of Justice.

Unequal Enforcement Of The Law: Targeting Aggressors For Mass Atrocity Prosecutions, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

It is a central tenet of the laws of war that they apply equally to all parties to a conflict. For this reason, a party that illegally launches a war benefits from all the same rights as a party that must defend against the illegal aggression. Countless philosophers have shown that this so-called equal application doctrine is morally indefensible and that defenders should have more rights and fewer responsibilities than aggressors. The equal application doctrine retains the support of legal scholars, however, because they reasonably fear that applying different rules to different warring parties will substantially reduce overall compliance with …

Corporations As Semi-States, Jay Butler

Faculty Publications

When Ebola came to West Africa in 2014, Liberia could not cope. The State’s already fragile public health infrastructure was largely ineffective in responding to the illness and preventing its spread. And, the World Health Organization’s support was slow and stilted. By contrast, Firestone, a tire company that operates a vast rubber plantation in Liberia and runs its own hospital for 80,000 employees, family dependents, and persons in neighboring localities, responded to the virus much more effectively.

This Article uses Firestone’s Ebola response as an entry point to study a phenomenon too frequently overlooked. Many for-profit firms that maintain operations …