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Full-Text Articles in Law
Towards A Communicative Theory Of International Law, Timothy L. Meyer
Towards A Communicative Theory Of International Law, Timothy L. Meyer
Scholarly Works
Does international law's effectiveness require a clear distinction between law and non-law? This essay, which reviews Jean d'Aspremont's Formalism and the Sources of International Law, argues the answer is no. Ambiguity about the legal nature of international instruments has important benefits. Clarity in the law may encourage states to do the minimum necessary to comply, while some uncertainty about what the law requires may induce states to take extra efforts to ensure they are in compliance. Ambiguity in the law also promotes dynamic change, an important feature in rapidly developing areas of the law such as international environmental law and …
Nuclear Arms Control: Challenges And Opportunities In 2013, Steven Pifer
Nuclear Arms Control: Challenges And Opportunities In 2013, Steven Pifer
Brookings Scholar Lecture Series
U.S. nuclear arms control policy must address numerous factors, including our strategic relationships with Russia and China, the potential for future nuclear weapons reductions--including non-strategic nuclear weapons, and the offense-defense relationship, given concerns that missile defense developments could in the future affect the nuclear balance. Washington DC must also consider its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, how to dissuade new countries from joining the nuclear weapons ranks, and what to do about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the United States has signed but not ratified. This presentation will explore challenges and opportunities facing Washington DC in the aftermath of …
Labor Rights, Human Rights And A Critical Sociology Of Law, Richard R. Weiner
Labor Rights, Human Rights And A Critical Sociology Of Law, Richard R. Weiner
Faculty Publications
Arguing for a transnational labor movement increasingly poses transnational labor rights as transnational human rights. Sociologically, how can such transnational labor rights be secured by institutions at a global level? Moving from human rights to transnational social rights? A seemingly aporia between the concepts of labor rights and human rights can be dialectically mediated by the tradition of a critical sociology of law in yielding a critical sociology of rights.
Unsigning The Rome Statute: Examining The Relationship Between The United States And The International Criminal Court, Allison Naylor
Unsigning The Rome Statute: Examining The Relationship Between The United States And The International Criminal Court, Allison Naylor
Honors Projects in History and Social Sciences
Presently, 120 states are parties to the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC). A state that one will not find on the list, however, would be the United States. This project examines the relationship between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the United States. The United States took part in the negotiating process, signing the Rome Statute under President Bill Clinton, but was not fully satisfied with the agreement reached. Under President Bush, however, the Rome Statute was unsigned. Presently, the United States remains unsigned on the Rome Statute. The relationship between the Court and the United States …
Codifying Custom, Timothy L. Meyer
Codifying Custom, Timothy L. Meyer
Scholarly Works
Codifying decentralized forms of law, such as the common law and customary law, has been a cornerstone of the positivist turn in legal theory since at least the nineteenth century. Commentators laud codification’s purported virtues, including systematizing, centralizing, and clarifying the law. These attributes are thought to increase the general welfare of those subject to legal rules, and therefore to justify and explain codification. The codification literature, however, overlooks codification’s distributive consequences. In so doing, the literature misses the primary motive for codification: to define legal rules in a way that advantages individual codifying institutions, regardless of how codification affects …
Book Review, International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practice (2010), Timothy L. Meyer
Book Review, International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practice (2010), Timothy L. Meyer
Scholarly Works
This essay reviews Ian Hurd’s International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practice. International law and international relations scholars are increasingly interested in the variation in the structures and powers of international organizations, as well as how that variation affects state decisions to comply with international law. Hurd’s book offers a nuanced overview of the relationship between the legal powers of international organizations and the political contexts in which they operate. The book uses eight case studies, including the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Court of Justice, and the International Labor Organization, to assess how different political environments and institutional …
Persuading To Comply: On The Deployment And Avoidance Of Legal Argumentation, Steven Ratner
Persuading To Comply: On The Deployment And Avoidance Of Legal Argumentation, Steven Ratner
Book Chapters
For those international actors seeking to promote respect for international law, persuasion -- the process of social interaction whereby one actor seeks to convince another to believe or do something through principled rational arguments and interactions, without any overt coercion -- is at the core of the enterprise. Yet the scholarship in international law and international relations is woefully thin on the content of such a communication of persuasion, and, in particular, on the role of legal argumentation. This paper constructs a theoretical model for determining when and how international actors deploy legal argumentation in contrast to other arguments that …
Transplanting The European Court Of Justice: The Experience Of The Andean Tribunal Of Justice, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter, Osvaldo Saldias
Transplanting The European Court Of Justice: The Experience Of The Andean Tribunal Of Justice, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter, Osvaldo Saldias
Faculty Scholarship
Although there is an extensive literature on domestic legal transplants, far less is known about the transplantation of supranational judicial bodies. The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is one of eleven copies of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), and the third most active international court. This article considers the origins and evolution of the ATJ as a transplanted judicial institution. It first reviews the literatures on legal transplants, neofunctionalist theory, and the spread of European ideas and institutions, explaining how the intersection of these literatures informs the study of supranational judicial transplants. The article next explains why the Andean …