International Law Commons^™

An International Sos (Save Our Sharks): How The International Legal Framework Should Be Used To Save Our Sharks, Crystal Green

Pace International Law Review

The purpose of this Article is to shed light on the plight on sharks in international and domestic waters. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed every year. The cruel and wasteful practice of shark finning is responsible for a large portion of those killings. Shark fins are the most valuable part of the shark, because they are used as the key ingredient – and namesake – in an Asian delicacy known as “shark fin soup.” This Article opens with background information on the dire situation sharks are facing in our oceans, and how the depletion of these top predators …

The Case Of Beatriz: An Outcry To Amend El Salvador’S Abortion Ban, Jonathan Alvarez

Pace International Law Review

This Note examines the evolution of El Salvador’s existing penal code, specifically focusing on the abortion legislation. Further, it examines the significance of The Case of Beatriz and it suggests reform for El Salvador’s government to include exceptions in their penal code, similar to exceptions available in the United States, to provide women with access to safe abortions in extreme circumstances. Part II will illustrate the struggle that women face in El Salvador. Part III will briefly explore the historical background of the current Penal Code, exclusively the abortion ban. Part IV will also discuss women’s rights violated by the …

Fleeing Cuba: A Comparative Piece Focused On Toro And The Options Victims Of Domestic Violence Have In Seeking Citizenship In The United States And Canada, Kiersten M. Schramek

Pace International Law Review

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided a case on February 4, 2013 that has undoubted international implications. Toro v. Sec’y dealt with the language of the Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act of 1966 (CAA) and the provisions of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

This article focuses on how and why the court reached its decision. It analyzes the conflict between the “plain language” of the CAA and its statutory construction to rebut the court’s assertion that the VAWA self-petition was irrelevant in this case, and ultimately, offer an alternative analysis to this case.

This article …

A Dire Need For Legislative Reform, Patrick Dowdle

Pace International Law Review

In Section I of this note, I will lay out the several reasons why 18 U.S.C. § 1651 needs reform. I will provide background information on modern day piracy, including its economic impact, and will then break down varying definitions of piracy and their applications in recent cases. I will explore the split in U.S. case law caused by the application of the UNCLOS definition of piracy in Dire, and will identify the quandaries that result from the UNCLOS definition. In Section II, I will address two specific problems stemming from § 1651 that came to light as a result …

Balancing National Public Policy And Free Trade, Diane A. Desierto

Pace International Law Review

In the wake of the impasse between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and India regarding the ratification of the Protocol to the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) that concluded during the Ninth WTO Ministerial Conference in Bali, Indonesia on December of 2013, WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo admitted that while the WTO succeeds in resolving trade disputes and monitoring trade practices, it “has failed to deliver new multilateral results since its creation.” This systemic failure in the trade negotiations pillar of the WTO is evident to all of its 160 Members. It is evident from thirteen years of stalled negotiations under the …

The Investigation Procedures Of The United Nations Office Of Internal Oversight Services And The Rights Of The United Nations Staff Member: An Analysis Of The United Nations Judicial Tribunals’ Judgments On Disciplinary Cases In The United Nations, Tamara A. Shockley

Pace International Law Review

An employee of an international organization misappropriates over one million dollars from a United Nations Peace-Keeping Mission’s designated for procurement of supplies. As a staff member of an international organization, he or she has functional immunity and cannot be investigated by the local jurisdiction or by authorities in his home country. Is this the “perfect crime”? Taking into consideration that these misappropriated funds are contributions from Member States of the United Nations, is there any recourse to investigate the facts of the incident to determine culpability?

International organizations have a legal obligation to ensure compliance with internal regulations, rules and …

A Theorization On Equity: Tracing Causal Responsibility For Missing Iraqi Antiquities And Piercing Official Immunity, Robert Bejesky

Pace International Law Review

Three weeks after the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, looters descended on the artifacts in the Iraq National Museum. Over ten thousand pieces were assumed destroyed or stolen, and the Coalition Provisional Authority estimated the losses at $12 billion. The gravity of the privation led the Security Council to include language in Resolution 1483 to restrict countries from trading in Iraq’s pillaged antiquities, and the U.S. Congress passed the Emergency Protection of Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act of 2004 to enforce the measures. Several thousand pieces were recovered, but thousands remain missing. In March 2013, Hussein ash-Shamri, the head of the Iraqi …

The Damage From Mega-Sporting Events In Brazil, J. Justin Woods

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Student Publications

Over the past several years, Brazil’s federal government and the city and state governments of Rio de Janeiro have invested tens of billions of dollars to develop the transportation, stadium, tourist, communications and security infrastructure required to host the 2007 Pan American Games, 2014 World Cup, and 2016 Summer Olympics. As Brazil seeks to use these mega- sporting events to assert itself as a major economic player on the word stage, its strategy demonstrates how hosting mega-events serves to attract regional and global capital, and to reinforce unequal power structures at the expense of the public treasury, environmental quality and …

Promoting Sustainable Development Through Environmental Law: Prospects For Saudi Arabia, Faisal K. Alturki

Dissertations & Theses

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia enjoys a rich cultural and natural heritage and has an advanced state of socio- economic development. It also suffers from a wide range of growing environmental problems such as securing its potable water supply, coping with solid and liquid waste, ensuring clean air or protecting the marine environment. It is the objective of sustainable development to ensure that further development in the Kingdom does not damage the public health of the people or the natural environment. The policies underlying sustainable development have developed internationally over the past four decades and are well explained in Agenda …

Preclusion Of Remedies Under Article 16(3) Of The Uncitral Model Law, Nata Ghibradze

Pace International Law Review

In search of actual consequences of (mis)use of the available remedies, Chapter II of the foregoing article starts by exploring whether the Model Law implies “choice of remedies” policy by examining its travaux préparatoires (hereinafter “travaux”). It also seeks to determine existence of “alternative system of defences” at cross-border level between remedies at the seat of arbitration and in the enforcement country. Chapter III engages in a determination of general framework of preclusions under the Model Law by analyzing specific provisions such as Article 4, 13 and 16(2).

Chapter IV, by analyzing the travaux, determines the primary purpose of the …

Reflections Of The World Bank’S Report On The Treatment Of The Insolvency Of Natural Persons In The Newest Consumer Bankruptcy Laws: Colombia, Italy, Ireland, Jason J. Kilborn

Pace International Law Review

In 2011, the World Bank initiated its first-ever examination of the policies and characteristics of effective insolvency systems for individuals (natural persons). This paper describes the two-year process that led to the publication of the World Bank’s landmark Report on the Treatment of the Insolvency of Natural Persons. After examining the key content and three major themes of the Report, three of the most recent new personal insolvency regimes are introduced with an eye to identifying the ways in which the themes of the Report are reflected in these new laws. The personal insolvency provisions in Colombian law most directly …

Contractual Excuse Under The Cisg: Impediment, Hardship, And The Excuse Doctrines, Larry A. Dimatteo

Pace International Law Review

This article will examine the law of excuse as espoused in the Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). It will examine the relevant case law applying the doctrine of impediment found in CISG Article 79. The question posed in this analysis is whether the word “impediment” relates only to the occurrences of force majeure, impossibility and frustration of purpose events or if it also includes changed circumstances, impracticability and hardship events. For purposes of simplicity, the first set of excuse or exemption doctrines will be analyzed under the heading of “impossibility” and the second set will …

The Conformity Of The Goods To The Contract In International Sales, Villy De Luca

Pace International Law Review

The present article aims to provide a general overview on the issue of conformity of the goods to the contract as regulated by Article 35 of the Convention on Contracts for the International Sales of Goods (“CISG”).

The analysis will focus on Article 35 CISG and, after having retraced the history that led to the current formulation of the provision, will concentrate on the implications following the adoption of a “unitary” notion of conformity. The evaluation will proceed focusing on the single express and implied conformity obligations covered, respectively, in the first and second paragraphs of Article 35 CISG.

The …

Is The Albert H Kritzer Database Telling Us More Than We Know?, Thomas Neumann

Pace International Law Review

This article is the first in a series of articles attempting to provide a geographical and temporal overview of the application practice of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). In this first article, the success of CISG is explored. The article develops the idea of using the Albert H. Kritzer Database to achieve an overview of the success of the Convention in practice. It is argued that the success of the Convention is useful to measure by its uniformity in practice, and therefore a set of criteria relating to the Convention’s application by …

Transportation, Cooperation And Harmonization: Gats As A Gateway To Integrating The Un Seaborne Cargo Regimes Into The Wto, Lijun Zhao

Pace International Law Review

This paper seeks to analyze how the World Trade Organization (WTO) may cooperate with the United Nations (UN) to unify sea-borne cargo regimes. Beginning with the current dilemma of uni-form maritime transport regime, the paper explores the relation-ship between the UN and the WTO. In light of the successful precedent of the incorporation of the UN intellectual property re-gime into the WTO, this paper probes into the feasibility that the UN and the WTO may interactively unify a maritime transport regime by reference to selected previous treaties, which include UN-administrated treaties. This paper argues the WTO-based sea transport negotiations do …

Criminal Responsibility For Arbitrators In Chinese Law: Perversion Of Law In Commercial Arbitration, Duan Xiaosong

Pace International Law Review

This article is prompted by a recent Chinese criminal provision governing the impartiality of arbitration. The goals of the article fare to critically examine the new criminal statute created by the provision and to put forward some proposals for reform, which could be employed to resolve the tension that exists between arbitrator impartiality and deference to arbitration. Although the new provision appears to eliminate the abuse of arbitral power, it may raise more questions than it resolves. This article explores the problems and undertakes a comparative analysis of the corresponding U.S. provision, as well as an analysis of some cultural …

Death By Bullying: A Comparative Culpability Proposal, Audrey Rogers

Pace Law Review

This article explores the possibility and advisability of imposing homicide charges against bullies, a controversial approach because of the serious causation questions it poses. Nonetheless, there is precedent for holding a person criminally culpable for a victim’s suicide. A notorious case involved the head of the Ku Klux Klan who was convicted of murder after the woman he raped killed herself by swallowing poison, “distracted by pain and shame so inflicted upon her.” Some may see her shame as analogous to gay teens who commit suicide after being bullied about their sexual orientation. But perhaps the law should not demand …

Indefinite Detention And Antiterrorism Laws: Balancing Security And Human Rights, Joanne M. Sweeny

Pace Law Review

This article does more than describe British and American anti-terrorism laws; it shows how those laws go through conflicted government branches and the bargains struck to create the anti-terrorism laws that exist today. Instead of taking these laws as given, this Article explains why they exist. More specifically, this article focuses on the path anti-terrorism legislation followed in the United States and the United Kingdom, with particular focus on each country’s ability (or lack thereof) to indefinitely detain suspected non-citizen terrorists. Both countries’ executives sought to have that power and both were limited by the legislatures and courts but in …

Taxpayers’ Lack Of Standing In International Tax Dispute Resolutions: An Analysis Based On The Hybrid Norms Of International Taxation, Limor Riza

Pace Law Review

This paper examines whether a taxpayer should have “standing” in international dispute resolutions. To answer this question the primary task is to identify the nature of international taxation. In other words, this paper discusses how to classify the field of international taxation. Is it part of public international law, private international law (i.e., conflict of laws), national (domestic) law, or is it a hybrid field that requires specific attention? Making this distinction is vital for resolving disputes when a taxpayer is taxed twice for cross-border transactions in cases where the double tax convention is unclear and both contracting states claim …

A Contextualized Account Of General Principles Of International Law, Michelle Biddulph, Dwight Newman

Pace International Law Review

This Article examines general principles of international law through the innovative means of comparing their use in four different, novel areas of international law—international environmental law, international investment law, international criminal law, and international indigenous rights. By doing so, the Article is able to make the distinct claim that there is no one, single methodology for analysis of general principles of international law. Rather, each area of international law tends to use a methodology suited to its policy objectives and overall characteristics as a specific area of law. The Article characterizes two predominant academic approaches to general principles: a purely …

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Legitimate Weapon Systems Or Unlawful Angels Of Death?, Michael J. Deegan

Pace International Law Review

Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the United States has utilized Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to locate, surveil and kill members of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and its associated forces. Such killings have decimated the leadership of these groups and disrupted their operations. However, there are collateral effects from UAV killings including civilian deaths. These deaths increase resentment and hatred toward the US, which is channeled by terrorist groups to recruit new members and for local support. Moreover, targeted killings outside a combat zone have political and diplomatic consequences. This paper argues that the current uses of UAV are legal under international …

A Spectrum Of International Criminal Procedure: Shifting Patterns Of Power Distribution In International Criminal Courts And Tribunals, Jessica Peake

Pace International Law Review

Using the pure adversarial model expounded in part I (a) as the baseline for analysis, Parts II, III and IV of this article will explore the procedural evolution that has taken place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (II), the International Criminal Court (III) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (IV). Part V will then plot the structural and procedural shifts that have taken place at those courts onto the spectrum of procedure identified in part I (c), before concluding, in Part VI, with what these shifts teach us about the convergence of adversarial …

Justice Or Peace? A Proposal For Resolving The Dilemma, Kenneth Williams

Pace International Law Review

This article will address the question of how the international community should respond when the pursuit of justice and the attainment of peace are incompatible. It begins with an overview of the international human rights movement prior to World War II, a period when there was almost no effort to hold human rights violators accountable. The article then discusses how Nuremberg transformed international human rights law and created the framework for holding individuals accountable for committing egregious human rights violations. In the next section there is a discussion of how, despite Nuremberg, there was an era of impunity as a …

Excuses, Justifications, And Duress At The International Criminal Tribunals, Noam Wiener

Pace International Law Review

This article examines the application of the defense of duress by international criminal tribunals through analyzing opposing theoretical approaches to justifications and excuses. The purpose of this examination is twofold. First, the article offers a framework for duress’s application by examining scholarly approaches to duress and by analyzing the application of the defense by international tribunals. This analysis includes the tribunals constituted following the Second World War and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Second, the article provides insight into the underlying rationales that guide judges at the international tribunals in the last decade through the judges’ application …

Raped By The System: A Comparison Of Prison Rape In The United States And South Africa, Alexandra Ashmont

Pace International Law Review

The main objective of this article is to create overall awareness and to give people a real sense of the events that go on every day inside prison walls. The article is meant to show people that the way they think about prison and prison rape specifically is severely jaded. What happens behind prison bars should certainly not stay behind prison bars. The stories within this article are unlike any prison rape stories people have heard before. They are harsh, inhumane, and deeply disturbing. The only way to incite change is to open people’s eyes to the true conditions within …

Climate Change Negotiations And Doha, Qatar, Sophia Sofferman

Pace International Law Review

This comment will focus on the role that the principle of common and differentiated responsibilities plays in global climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change and more recent climate negotiations by the Conference of the Parties. More specifically, this comment will focus on the implications this has for developing and developed countries, namely on China and the United States as the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, and as developing and developed countries respectively.

Recognizing Education Rights In India And The United States: All Roads Lead To The Courts?, Ashley Feasley

Pace International Law Review

The approaches of United States and India take disparate form: India has recognized the right to education and is attempting to implement the right, whereas the United States has not formally recognized the right to education itself but has acknowledged a limited right to educational opportunity, but has implemented some sort of right to education unequally by relying on the states to guarantee and implement some kind of remedy. This paper aims to evaluate the American and Indian approaches towards the right to education. Section II discusses the interrelatedness of social and economic and civil and political rights and the …

Global Cyber Intermediary Liability: A Legal & Cultural Strategy, Jason H. Peterson, Lydia Segal, Anthony Eonas

Pace Law Review

This Article fills the gap in the debate on fighting cybercrime. It considers the role of intermediaries and the legal and cultural strategies that countries may adopt. Part II.A of this Article examines the critical role of intermediaries in cybercrime. It shows that the intermediaries’ active participation by facilitating the transmission of cybercrime traffic removes a significant barrier for individual perpetrators. Part II.B offers a brief overview of legal efforts to combat cybercrime, and examines the legal liability of intermediaries in both the civil and criminal context and in varying legal regimes with an emphasis on ISPs. Aside from some …

Executive Power And Regional Climate Change Agreements, Conor J. Walline

Pace Environmental Law Review

This Article explores the potential for such agreements to address climate change on a regional level by analyzing the parallels between the agreements, the nature and limits of the executive power used to create them, and the scope of enforcement available under them. Section II briefly examines the present state of climate warming and its attendant impacts, while Section III highlights the relative failure of current national and international approaches to mitigating climate change. Section IV focuses on the recent rise of environmental regional agreements in the United States, specifically those agreements to which the State of New York has …

Norway’S Companies Act: A 10-Year Look At Gender Equality, Kristen Carroll

Pace International Law Review

This analysis assesses the amendment to Norway’s Companies Act, in light of the 10-year anniversary of the mandate of female representation on corporate boards. First, I discuss the implementation of the quota, Section 6-11a. Second, I compare three statistical studies that analyze the effects of the quota on corporate profitability, overall firm performance, and the changing dynamics of the managerial positions. Finally, I evaluate the various avenues to fully achieving diversity, such as the successes and failures of a quota-type system and possible initiatives that governments and companies can enact to achieve gender-balance in the workplace. While some hypothesize that …