Comparative and Foreign Law Commons^™

The Possibilities Of Constitutional Education, Mark Jia

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Constitutional scholarship has traditionally focused on formal constitutional actors: courts, legislatures, and executives. These actors are often regarded as primary sources of constitutional law, or in some cases, as final arbiters of constitutional meaning. More peripheral in this literature are actors thought to transmit what courts and high officials have established. These constitutional educators, including law professors, legal journalists, and civics planners, are often overlooked for defensible reasons: They lack the normative authorities of formal institutional actors, and they do not exercise power as it is often understood in public law.

This Article advances a general theory of constitutional education …

From Chainsaws To Courtrooms: Corporate Climate Litigation And Deforestation In Brazil, Maria Antonia Tigre, Mariana Barbosa Cirne

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Corporate climate litigation has emerged as one of the most dynamic and high profile tools for addressing the private sector’s role in the climate crisis. While much of the scholarship and public debate has centered on cases in the United States and Europe, litigation targeting corporations in the Global South — particularly Brazil — has grown rapidly, both in volume and significance. Brazil now ranks among the world’s top jurisdictions for corporate climate damage claims. These suits have pioneered methods for quantifying climate damages, often from illegal deforestation, and have tested the reach of the civil liability regime in novel …

International Advice, Mature Democracies And The Venice Commission, Maartje De Visser

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The aim of this article is to explore the role and practice of constitutional advice-giving as it relates to mature democracies. More precisely, this article considers how the Venice Commission – the official advisory body for constitutional matters of the Council of Europe – exercises its mandate vis-à-vis such democracies through the delivery of country-specific Opinions, based on a close reading of all such Opinions rendered between 2002 and 2024. It examines the substantive focus of those Opinions, the way they engage with constitutional experiences elsewhere, as well as the tone of the assessment and the approach taken in formulating …

The Continuum Of Contractual Commitment, David Snyder

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Contracts frequently call for one or more differentiated levels of contractual commitment. Although contractual liability in the common law is said to be strict liability, and a claim that a good attempt was made is said to be no defense, often a party promises only to try. Contract theory in the United States struggles with departures from the paradigm of strict liability, and it has failed to fully consider the continuum of contractual commitment. To encompass the range of assent-based commitment and its consequent liability, U.S. contract theory needs to distinguish more clearly between (1) promises to try, which do …

Adjudicating Fake News, Filippo Lancieri, Caio Mario Da Silva Pereira Neto, Rodrigo Moura Karolczak, Barbara Marchiori De Assis

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

On July 30, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed 50% tariffs on imports from Brazil and sanctioned a sitting Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, both partially because of Brazil’s online content moderation decisions. This is an extreme, but not an isolated event: worldwide, legislators and regulators struggle to craft public policies that address problems of disinformation and online harassment while protecting the freedom of expression—leading to increasing international confrontations. One key question in content moderation is content adjudication—or who is responsible for deciding what type of speech violates the law and should be taken down (or not). This article contributes to …

Insolvency Law In The Global South: Lessons For The Global North, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Despite the influence of the Global North in many insolvency laws and practices in the Global South, this article shows that the Global South has innovated in many aspects of insolvency law. In some cases, these innovations consist of solutions that, with certain adjustments, have been imported from the Global North. In others, they are really ‘autochthonous innovations’ from the Global South. This article identifies both types of innovations, providing examples from jurisdictions such as Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, Peru, Philippines, Thailand and Uruguay. More importantly, it will be shown how those innovations from …

U.S. Shareholder Activism: Convergence With Japan, Nobuhisa Ishizuka

Faculty Scholarship

To many observers long accustomed to slow, incremental change, the current boom in shareholder activism in Japan comes as a surprise. The opening for U.S.-style activists was created by market conditions that eventually resulted in policy changes that attracted significant numbers of foreign investors. However, even the current market would not have emerged without a parallel evolution in U.S. hedge-fund tactics, which gradually shifted over a number of years to a sophisticated and more nuanced approach, one based on partnership and dialogue with target companies, in contrast to adversarial relationships and public campaigns. This article attempts to place current trends …

A Legal Transplant Failure In The Ai Age, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

Thailand positions itself as the new AI-driven innovation hub in the Southeast Asia region as Big Tech companies invest billions in building new data centers to power the AI transformations in all sectors in Thailand. An integral part of Thailand’s new ambition is the legal transplant of personal data protection law from Europe. The transplant, however, is of form, not substance, as this Article illustrates the failure through in-depth analysis of Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act and provides evidence of rampant violations and noncompliance by the largest ecommerce conglomerate and SMEs. This Article offers suggestions for Thailand to realign its …

El Salvador At The Crossroads: Crimes Against Humanity Under The Public Security Policy, Susana L. Sacouto, Claudia Martin, Gino Costa, Santiago Canton, Jose Antonio Guevara

Research Reports & White Papers

The International Group of Experts for the Investigation of Human Rights Violations under the State of Emergency in El Salvador (GIPES) presents its final report entitled: “El Salvador at the Crossroads: Crimes against Humanity under the Public Security Policy.”

GIPES was formed with the aim of investigating the alleged serious human rights violations taking place in the context of the State of Exception public security policy that has been in place of El Salvador since March 2022 and determining whether they might constitute crimes against humanity. The group is made up of five internationally recognized jurists: Susana SáCouto, …

Framing Harmonization: Illusion And Reality In The Riyadh Design Law Treaty, Christine Farley, Margo Bagley

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

From the outside, the Riyadh Design Law Treaty (RDLT) has long appeared as a modest administrative measure. Negotiated in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Trademarks (SCT), it has repeatedly been characterized as a ‘‘procedural treaty’’ concerned with filing formalities rather than substantive reform. The contrast with the WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (GRATK Treaty) is striking. Both both treaties adopted in 2024 after 20+ years of negotiation. But only the GRATK Treaty attracted sustained scholarly and civil society engagement; the RDLT attracted almost none.

Performing Legality: When And Why Chinese Government Leaders Show Up In Court, Rachel E. Stern, Jieun Kim, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Since 2015, Chinese government leaders have been required by law to appear in court when citizens sue their unit or to designate an employee to take their place. We frame this policy as a demand on leaders to “perform legality,” sacrificing their time to demonstrate how seriously the government takes legal proceedings. Drawing on an original dataset of 127,529 administrative lawsuits decided between 2015 and 2018, we investigate how often government leaders appear in Chinese courtrooms, and for which kinds of cases. Overall, leaders attended 24.72% of hearings. Contrary to the State Council’s instructions to prioritize attendance in lawsuits that …

Outsourcing Legal Modernity: Late Colonial Constitutionalism In Muslim Northern Nigeria, Rabiat Akande

Articles & Book Chapters

The final years of British imperial rule in Northern Nigeria witnessed efforts to source appropriate models of legal modernization from the Muslim world. The models afloat in constitutional discourse, those of Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, and Egypt, were held up by respective proponents as ideal for resolving the long-fraught question of the relationship between Islam and public law in a modern state. Yet, the evocations of these foreign models were idealized imaginaries; by framing these models as settled facts, the Northern Nigerian evocations flattened the constitutional experience of these states and obscured unfolding struggles over the nature of legal modernity. Against …

Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence For Lawyers: That Is The Sound Of Inevitability: Legislatures And Regulators Step In, Cliff Mckinney

Arkansas Law Notes

In The Matrix, the evil artificial intelligence entity, Agent Smith, corners the human hero, Neo, on the subway tracks. Agent Smith says, “You hear that Mr. Anderson? . . . That is the sound of inevitability. . . .” And if there is one thing that is inevitable, it is that regulations will quickly develop around the way that we interact with and utilize artificial intelligence.

No matter how innovative or disruptive artificial intelligence may be, lawmakers and regulators will not allow it to operate unchecked. Congress recently elected not to impose a moratorium on state regulation, and California has …

Seeing Beyond The Words: What Interdisciplinary Methodologies Reveal About International Law, Matthew S. Erie, Mark Pollack, Wolfgang Alschner, Beth Simmons, Katerina Linos

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: On April 24, 2025, the International Law and Social Science Interest Group debuted at the ASIL Annual Meeting with a panel that posed a deceptively simple question: how can social science tools advance the work of international lawyers? Chaired by Chantal Thomas, the session brought together Matthew Erie, Wolfgang Alschner, Beth Simmons, and Katerina Linos— scholars who bridge doctrinal and empirical inquiry—to show how ethnography, computational text analysis, counterfactual inference, and mixed-method design can illuminate legal puzzles that doctrine alone cannot solve. The four short essays in this symposium provide parallel illustrations of this core theme: Erie’s ethnographic approach …

Resilient Dispute Resolution Systems For International Energy Conflicts, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez

Faculty Scholarship

Energy-related conflicts are on the rise, spanning diverse issues such as the impacts of rare mineral mining on local communities, the impacts of sanctions on energy investments due to the Russia-Ukraine war, and the impacts of expanded subsidies on the electric vehicle and solar panel industries. Increasingly, companies, communities, and governments are clashing over the challenges of pursuing disparate and sometimes competing energy policies. This Article argues that dispute resolution mechanisms in the energy investment sector must be fundamentally rethought. Traditional semi-adjudicatory models, which focus on winners and losers, fail to accommodate the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary energy …

Transforming Blood Management Systems In Developing Countries Through Technological And Artificial Intelligence-Driven Innovations, Sandeep Bhargava, Shaun Aaron Abram, Srividhya Ragavan

Faculty Scholarship

It is critical to ensure the safe and quality supply of blood among various stakeholders; however, this remains a significant challenge in today’s world, especially in developing countries. These countries face severe problems, including blood shortages, fragmented regulatory frameworks, and inconsistent quality control measures. To tackle these challenges, countries like India are trying to implement the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and its derivative platforms to transform blood collection, testing, storage, and distribution by enabling interoperability, real-time compliance monitoring, automated donor screening, optimized inventory management, and advanced component separation. The article argues that developing countries must adopt both regulatory reform …

Comparative Authoritarian Law, Madhav Khosla, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, comparative constitutional lawyers have turned their attention to the study of democratic backsliding. However, such scholarship is yet to draw on the now extensive literature on traditional authoritarian systems. The bifurcation of regime type that has structured comparative legal research for decades — for comparative constitutional lawyers and for scholars of specific authoritarian regions — is now under strain. With the global rise of authoritarianism and the growing use of law by authoritarian states, the world is harder to neatly separate into two camps than it once might have been. This Article reflects on how we might …

A Proposal For Citizenship As Reparations For Descendants Of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Dan Olson

Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Adversarial Comparativism: The Role Of Emotion In United States–China Comparative Law Projects, Matthew S. Erie

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Contemporary comparative law operates across a landscape riven by protectionism, nationalism, and securitization, all of which complicate comparative law projects. Nowhere is this more evident than in the U.S-China relationship, the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Despite economic “delinking,” the U.S. and Chinese legal systems are interacting more than ever; however, how this interaction works is poorly understood. This Article proposes “adversarial comparativism” to explain this dynamic. It is an approach to comparative law and politics that includes different modalities: competition, aggressiveness, transactionalism, misunderstanding, opportunism, and gaslighting. Many of these are underpinned by emotion. As such, while this …

Comparative Visions For U.S. Group-Based Asylum Proposal, Lauren N. Hughes

Scholarly Articles

Images of asylum seekers and migrants desperate to enter the United States at the southern border abound in U.S. media. Less familiar to the American public, but intertwined with the highly politicized modern migration crisis, is the ever-growing backlog of pending asylum applications before both the Asylum Office and Immigration Courts. This backlog has many causes, including underresourced agencies, a growing number of asylum applicants, the high evidentiary burden and complexities inherent to asylum law, and the lack of counsel for many asylum seekers. In response to this crippling backlog, some scholars propose the adoption of a “group-based” asylum mechanism. …

Supporting Comparative Studies Of Judicial Behavior: Introducing The Australian High Court Database, Patrick Leslie, Zoë Robinson, Russell Smyth, Tonja Jacobi

Faculty Articles

Comparative research on law and legal institutions depends on high-quality data infrastructure. This article introduces the Australian High Court Database—a new resource that encodes structured information on all full judgments of the High Court of Australia between 1995 and 2020, and all leave applications (Australia’s equivalent to petitions for certiorari) from 2003 to 2018. The database is built in accordance with core principles that support comparative research: it is adaptable, and comparable. By attending to jurisdictional specificity while adhering to general standards, the database supports both within-country analysis and cross-national comparison. We illustrate how the Australian High Court Database can …

Cold Comfort: Japan’S “Comfort Women” Litigation Under Transnational Law, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

Transnational human rights litigation has emerged as a powerful tool to remediate state and corporate abuses. Courts, however, rarely evince the same enthusiasm for these lawsuits as practitioners, scholars, and activists. For the past thirty-five years, “comfort women,” or survivors of wartime sexual exploitation, have used transnational litigation to seek redress from the Japanese government. Yet they have lost nearly all their cases. This Article uses ten “comfort women” lawsuits from Japan to test the limits of transnational human rights litigation. While judges rarely found for the comfort women, their verdicts nonetheless advanced the redress issue by showing the illegality …

Dokdo/Takeshima And Maritime Delimitation Between The Republic Of Korea And Japan: A Comment On Icj Dispute Resolution, Katherine Angell

Celebrating WCL Student Authors

The Republic of Korea (Korea) should agree to submit the issue of sovereignty over Dokdo/Takeshima and the issue of maritime delimitation in the East Sea/Sea of Japan to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) because the ICJ is likely to decide that Dokdo/Takeshima is Korean territory and the tensions in the East Sea/Sea of Japan can be resolved to allow further cooperation between the two nations. The ICJ is the primary avenue for peacefully resolving territorial and maritime delimitation disputes between nations, and the ICJ has developed a substantial body of case law analyzing these issues. The ICJ considers various …

Moréteau On Law, Language & Heritage, Agustin Parise, Mariano Vitetta, Michel Séjean

All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Kim Gyeong-Seok And The Origins Of Northeast Asia’S Corporate Accountability Movement For War And Colonialism, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

Campaigns to review Japan’s wartime legacy and legal liability have recurred throughout postwar Japan. While most of these efforts have targeted the Japanese government, an important subset of actors has also focused on the role of Japanese corporations. And perhaps no one played a larger role in directing attention towards Japan, Inc. than Kim Gyeong-seok, a Korean forced laborer in the 1940s turned redress activist in the 1990s. As described in this Article, Kim’s 1991 lawsuit against Nihon Kokan launched the corporate accountability piece of the reparations project, an endeavor that continues to create ripples even now. The Article briefly …

Comparison Of Groundwater Ownership Regimes In Ten Jurisdictions Across Five Continents, Gabriel Eckstein, Theo Buchler, Caleb Cook, Heping Dang, Robyn Stein, Stefano Burchi, Gabriela Cuadrado Quesada, Juan Pablo Galeano, Eric Garner, Amy Hardberger, Imad Antoine Ibrahim, Oudi Kgomongwe

Faculty Scholarship

The regulation of groundwater remains underdeveloped globally and often lags behind the domestic governance of surface water. As a result, groundwater is often subject to unfettered extraction, uses, and contamination. A clear understanding of ownership is central to the success of domestic regulations. However, the types of ownership regime in place in nations around the world are poorly documented in the academic literature. This study addresses that gap through a comparative analysis of domestic groundwater ownership regimes across ten jurisdictions in nine countries spanning five continents. It identifies three dominant models of groundwater ownership: private ownership, public ownership, and non-ownership …

Copyright Eligibility For Ai Works Under United States Law, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

This article examines copyright eligibility for works that incorporate generative AI elements under United States law, explaining that such works may be protected only to the extent they contain human-authored expression.  This expression can appear as creative selection, arrangement, editing, or other expressive contributions, while unedited or autonomously generated AI output is not copyrightable. The article highlights how the U.S. Copyright Office’s registration and review system, through disclosure requirements, refusals, and public registration records, creates meaningful evidence about boundaries of copyright protection for AI-assisted works. The article contrasts this U.S. registration framework with other legal systems, including European jurisdictions such …

Ghosts At The Gate: A Call For Vigilance Against Ai-Generated Case Hallucinations, Christina Frohock

Articles

No abstract provided.

How Design Law Is Taking Shape In The United States And European Union, Christine Haight Farley

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Essay uses a comparative framework to show that sophisticated design rights holders in both the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (EU) increasingly sidestep specialized design regimes in favor of more expansive trademark and copyright doctrines. Although both jurisdictions now operate cumulative intellectual property (IP) systems for industrial design, they have taken sharply divergent paths in confronting the proliferation of “design dupes”—replicas that trade on the appeal of sought-after designs. In the United States, rights holders rely chiefly on trademark law, and especially trade dress, to convert cultural recognition into legally cognizable source indication, a move facilitated by …

Challenging The State To Protect The Right To A Future Healthy Environment, Grace Messimer

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review (CICLR) Blog

Climate change litigation has been increasingly used in different countries to fight the climate crisis through various judicial systems. As of December 2022, there have been over 2,000 climate-related cases in international courts, federal courts, and more local courthouses, with litigation taking place in 65 different jurisdictions. Climate change litigation includes “cases that raise material issues of law or fact relating to climate change mitigation, adaptation or the science of climate change.”

This post was originally published on the Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review on January 21, 2025. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button …