Law Commons^™

Methodology And Misdirection: Custom And The Icj, Harlan G. Cohen

Popular Media

Associate Professor Harlan G. Cohen published "Methodology and Misdirection: Custom and the ICJ" on the European Journal of International Law's blog EILJ: Talk! on December 1, 2015.

The Identification Of Customary International Law And Other Topics: The Sixty-Seventh Session Of The International Law Commission, Sean D. Murphy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The International Law Commission held its sixty-seventh session in Geneva from May 4 to June 5, and from July 6 to August 7, 2015, under the chairmanship of Narinder Singh (India). Notably, the Commission’s drafting committee completed a full set of sixteen draft conclusions on the topic of “identification of customary international law,” paving the way for those conclusions with commentaries to be approved by the Commission on first reading in 2016.

Additionally, the Commission provisionally adopted with commentaries initial draft guidelines on “protection of the atmosphere” and initial draft articles on “crimes against humanity,” as well as one further …

Concept And Contract In The Future Of International Law, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

This is an article written for a symposium on Joel Trachtman’s book, The Future of International Law. I first deal with the contractarian features of Trachtman’s approach to understanding international law. Using the tools of new institutional economics and constitutional economics, Trachtman seeks to describe the features of an international legal system. This is positive political theory or at least relates substantially to the methods of positive political theory. I explore a different approach, one connecting to normative political theory. In its ambitious sense, my approach would see international law as a form of moral argument, but in its modest …

What Should Restatement (Fourth) Say About Treaty Interpretation?, Jean Galbraith

All Faculty Scholarship

Restatement (Second) and Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law took notably different approaches to treaty interpretation, reflecting intervening changes in the legal landscape. This symposium contribution identifies five developments in international and domestic law since Restatement (Third). It then considers their import for the forthcoming Restatement (Fourth). Most importantly, it argues that Restatement (Fourth) should fully incorporate two articles on treaty interpretation from the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties into its black-letter provisions. Since the time of Restatement (Third), these articles have become central to international practice on treaty interpretation, and the principles they set forth are …