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Full-Text Articles in Law
Congress's International Legal Discourse, Kevin L. Cope
Congress's International Legal Discourse, Kevin L. Cope
Michigan Law Review
Despite Congress’s important role in enforcing U.S. international law obligations, the relevant existing literature largely ignores the branch. This omission may stem partly from the belief, common among both academics and lawyers, that Congress is generally unsympathetic to or ignorant of international law. Under this conventional wisdom, members of Congress would rarely if ever imply that international law norms should impact otherwise desirable domestic legislation. Using an original dataset comprising thirty years of legislative histories of pertinent federal statutes, this Article questions and tests that view. The evidence refutes the conventional wisdom. It shows instead that, in legislative debates over …
A Standard Of Global Justice, Steven R. Ratner
A Standard Of Global Justice, Steven R. Ratner
Book Chapters
This chapter presents the standard of justice that is used in this book to appraise international law. That standard is based on two core principles, or what the book calls pillars—the promotion of international and intrastate peace, on the one hand, and respect for the basic human rights of all individuals, on the other. The justice of international norms is determined by the extent to which they lead to a state of affairs involving peace and human rights, with some room for deontological considerations in limited situations. The chapter defends the choice of these two pillars. It elaborates on the …
Questioning The Peremptory Status Of The Prohibition Of The Use Of Force, James A. Green
Questioning The Peremptory Status Of The Prohibition Of The Use Of Force, James A. Green
Michigan Journal of International Law
It is incontrovertible that the prohibition of the unilateral use of force is a fundamental aspect of the United Nations (U.N.) era system for governing the relations between states. Given this fact, the prohibition, as set out most crucially in Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, is often seen as the archetypal example of a jus cogens norm (a "peremptory norm" of general international law). Certainly, an overwhelming majority of scholars view the prohibition as having a peremptory character. Similarly, the International Law Commission (ILC) has taken this view and it is arguable that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) …
Fragmentation In A Positive Light, Bruno Simma
Fragmentation In A Positive Light, Bruno Simma
Michigan Journal of International Law
The organizers of the present symposium demonstrated a keen sense of topicality when they chose "Diversity or Cacophony? New Sources of Norms in International Law?" as the subject-matter of the 25th Anniversary Symposium of the Michigan Journal of International Law. For the last decade or so, the question whether the international legal order finds itself in the process of fragmentation, and if so, what the consequences of this development will be, has been a popular area of study for many jurists; most of them expressing their concern about what they consider to constitute a threat to the unity of …
Commentary To Professor Hafner, Annika Tahvanainen
Commentary To Professor Hafner, Annika Tahvanainen
Michigan Journal of International Law
This Comment is a response to Professor Hafner's presentation in which he considered fragmentation as an unavoidable consequence of the increasing number of norms and judicial mechanisms, as well as of the regionalization of international law and the weakening of the state system.
Pros And Cons Ensuing From Fragmentation Of International Law, Gerhard Hafner
Pros And Cons Ensuing From Fragmentation Of International Law, Gerhard Hafner
Michigan Journal of International Law
The system of international law has become increasingly fragmented, particularly since the end of the Cold War. This paper intends to present the main features of this development and its implications.
Bridging Fragmentation And Unity: International Law As A Universe Of Inter-Connected Islands, Joost Pauwelyn
Bridging Fragmentation And Unity: International Law As A Universe Of Inter-Connected Islands, Joost Pauwelyn
Michigan Journal of International Law
The fragmentation of the international legal system is not new. The consent-based nature of international law inevitably led to the creation of almost as many treaty regimes, composed of different constellations of states, as there are problems to be dealt with. Traditionally, these different regimes operated in virtual isolation from each other. Most importantly, the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank, IMF, and GATT, now WTO) focused on the world's economic problems, while the UN institutions tackled the world's political problems. Both the IMF and World Bank articles of agreement, for example, explicitly state that political factors cannot be taken into …
The Reality Of Private Rights, Duties, And Participation In The International Legal Process, Jordan J. Praust
The Reality Of Private Rights, Duties, And Participation In The International Legal Process, Jordan J. Praust
Michigan Journal of International Law
In a realistic and descriptive sense, international law is a complex and dynamic legal process profoundly interconnected with regional and domestic legal processes throughout the globe. There are no single sources or evidences of international law; no single set of participants; and no single arenas or institutional arrangements for the creation, invocation, application, change or termination of such law. Like all human law, it is full of human choice and rich in individual and group participation and inter-affectation. Awareness of this reality can have significant consequences with respect to identification of international legal norms, realistic meaning or content, remedies, and …
African Courts, International Law, And Comparative Case Law: Chimera Or Emerging Human Rights Jurisprudence?, Mirna E. Adjami
African Courts, International Law, And Comparative Case Law: Chimera Or Emerging Human Rights Jurisprudence?, Mirna E. Adjami
Michigan Journal of International Law
Though the potential creation of a supranational human rights court has brought international attention to the African human rights system, international law and human rights scholars rarely turn to African examples when studying the domestic application of international human rights norms. This Article seeks to fill that gap by analyzing cases from several Anglophone common law countries in sub-Saharan Africa that invoke international law and comparative case law as interpretive support in their national fundamental rights jurisprudence.
Mrs. Watu: Seven Steps To Trade Sanctions Analysis, Raj Bhala
Mrs. Watu: Seven Steps To Trade Sanctions Analysis, Raj Bhala
Michigan Journal of International Law
An earlier version of this article was published as MRS. WATU and International Trade Sanctions, 33 INT'L LAW Spring 1999. The first draft of this article was presented in Washington, D.C. on 14 May 1998 at The Department of Commerce-George Washington University Third Annual Institute on International Trade and Investment.
The Concept Of Compliance As A Function Of Competing Conceptions Of International Law, Benedict Kingsbury
The Concept Of Compliance As A Function Of Competing Conceptions Of International Law, Benedict Kingsbury
Michigan Journal of International Law
The purpose of this article is to challenge the tendency in the existing literature to view "compliance" simply as "correspondence of behavior with legal rules." This tendency is intelligibly based in a theoretical view that law can properly be defined and understood as a body of rules and expresses a practical concern to get on with the important task of producing empirical studies of compliance. The logical corollary is that a reasonable degree of conformity between these rules and actual behavior is necessary to an efficacious legal system, so that recurrent and widespread non-conformity with rules would usually call into …
Why Nations Behave, Jose E. Alvarez
Why Nations Behave, Jose E. Alvarez
Michigan Journal of International Law
The idea for this symposium on "implementation, compliance and effectiveness" grew out of the 1997 annual meeting of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), devoted to that theme. As one of the co-chairs of that meeting, I suggested to the student editors of this journal that they solicit articles on a topic that has seized the attention of researchers within international law as well as in seemingly unrelated fields. As Professor Thomas Franck has indicated in a recent well-received book, an ever increasing number of scholars are going beyond well-worn debates about whether international law is truly "law" to …