International Law Commons^™

International Commercial Arbitration And International Courts, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

The editors of this symposium have asked us to address an interesting question. Why hasn't international commercial arbitration’s (ICA's) success been repeated in the context of international courts? In the last few decades, states have created scores of permanent tribunals with jurisdiction to resolve disputes about international law. By and large, though, states have not been as receptive to the rulings of these tribunals. What accounts for this comparative lack of hospitality? Why do states treat ICA and international adjudication so differently?

In this essay, I offer an explanation. States treat ICA and international adjudication differently because they are categorically …

A Tale Of Two Networks: Terrorism, Transnational Law, And Network Theory, Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

Talk of networks and "network theory" has become almost ubiquitous in the field of counterterrorism. Terrorist organizations are networks. Terrorists have been empowered by the Internet, ethnic diasporas, and cell phones—networks all. Many of the putative targets of terrorists—electrical grids, oil pipelines, and transportation systems, to name a few—are themselves networks. And, perhaps less often mentioned, terrorists are increasingly hampered by national and international laws that foster cooperation and coordination among states—a network of laws.

From "smart mobs" to "net wars," from narco-trafficking to the Internet, network theory has provided insights into decentralized social organizations and their coordinated action. Both …

Three Narratives Of Medellín V. Texas, Margaret E. Mcguiness

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Every once in a while, a Supreme Court case comes along that holds a mirror up to the changing face of the American polity. Medellín v. Texas (Medellín II) is such a case, reflecting divisive national debates over immigration, the death penalty, victims' rights, the scope of executive power, U.S. adherence to international human rights standards, the salience of international law to national security, and the appropriate role of judicial review of political decisions. Which of those issues stands out among the reflected images depends on who is peering into the mirror.

For international law scholars, the significance of …

Return To Missouri V. Holland: Federalism And International Law, Margaret E. Mcguiness

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Columbia, Missouri is a fitting venue at which to continue the conversation about Missouri v. Holland and explore the intersection of law-making at the international, national and sub-national levels. This symposium revisits the debate over national and local control over foreign affairs and brings together the constitutional doctrinal discussion and accounts of the globalization of regulation that consider the complexity of influences operating within and between multiple systems of law. Both the factual background of Holland (primarily a case about environmental regulation) and the doctrinal context in which it arose (a Supreme Court poised to move toward constitutional endorsement …

Cuban Claims: Embargoed Identities And The Cuban-American Oedipal Conflict (El Grito De La Yuma), Jose M. Gabilondo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rational Choice, Reputation, And Human Rights Treaties, Alex Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of Disability In Local And Global Worlds, Michael Ashley Stein

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Primer For U.S. Lawyers On European Union Government And Law, Charles H. Koch Jr.

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Challenging Political Boundaries In Post-Conflict States, Angela M. Banks

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

International Courts And Tribunals, Lee M. Caplan, Nancy Amoury Combs, Carl Magnus Nesser, Ucheora O. Onwuamaegbu, Cesare P.R. Romano

Faculty Publications

This article summarizes significant developments in 2006 concerning international courts and tribunals, particularly events relating to the International Court of Justice, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, and arbitral tribunals constituted under the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes Between States and Nationals of Other States. This article covers the period of activity from December 1, 2005, to November 30, 2006.

Babes With Arms: International Law And Child Soldiers, Timothy Webster

Faculty Publications

This article examines advances in preventing children from participating in armed conflict. It references international human rights treaties, UN Security Council resolutions and jurisprudence from international courts to chart the course by which recruiting child soldiers became an international crime. At the same time, it calls on UN bodies – and the states that comprise them – to implement some of the many resolutions and veiled threats leveled at various groups and militias that use child soldiers.

Promoting Diverse Cultural Expression: Lessons From The U.S. Copyright Wars, Raymond Shih Ray Ku

Faculty Publications

In 2007, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression (CCD) with the goal of creating an environment that encourages individuals and social groups to create, distribute, and have access to diverse cultural expression from their own cultural and from cultures around the world. With regard to domestic and international efforts to implement the CCD and reconcile its goals with other international norms, the author argues that valuable lessons can be learned from current trends and issues in U.S. copyright law. Specifically, the author argues that the current debate over copyright's …

Chaos In The Courtroom, Controlling Disruptive Defendants And Contumacious Counsel In War Crimes Trials, Michael P. Scharf

Faculty Publications

During the eight month-long Dujail trial (October 2005-August 2006), Saddam Hussein, his seven co-defendants, and their dozen lawyers regularly disparaged the judges, interrupted witness testimony with outbursts, turned cross examination into political diatribes, and staged frequent walk-outs and boycotts. Drawn from the author's September 2006 lecture to the staff of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, this article examines some of history's previous messy trials and the strategies judges have employed with varying degrees of success to respond to disruptive conduct by trial participants. It then describes the various tactics employed by the …

Forward: Lessons From The Saddam Trial, Michael P. Scharf

Faculty Publications

Forward to the conference on "Lessons from the Daddam Trial."

Nafta's Double Standard Of Review, Juscelino F. Colares

Faculty Publications

Chapter 19 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) replaced court review of U.S. antidumping and countervailing duties with binding review by special binational panels of trade experts. It requires these panels to apply the same standard of review that U.S. courts use in trade remedy cases. Despite the centrality of this requirement to the Chapter 19 panel system, these panels have not adhered to this mandate. Chapter 19 panels overturn U.S. agency rulings much more often than the courts. In fact, they apply two different standards of review: exacting scrutiny where foreign producers and governments appeal, and near-absolute …

Congress, The Supreme Court, And Enemy Combatants: How Lawmakers Buoyed Judicial Supremacy By Placing Limits On Federal Court Jurisdiction, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Theory Of Expressive International Law, Alex Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein

Faculty Publications

Ever since Grotius first suggested that desire for esteem from the broader global community motivates States to comply with international law, identifying just how this desire effects compliance has proven illusive. The ability to harness the pull of international society is important to virtually all treaty formation and compliance. It is especially important in the area of human rights regimes where other compliance forces such as coercion, are rarely, if ever, used. Recent empirical evidence, however, suggests that human rights regimes are ineffective. Indeed, in many situations this evidence suggests that the human rights practices of States that ratify such …

Whose Public, Whose Order? Imperium, Region, And Normative Friction, Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

Theories of international law and politics are a product of their times. They focus on the issues of the day (or of the immediate past) and their assumptions are often the assumptions of the society in which they were born. Perhaps that it is why so many international relations scholars were surprised by the end of the Cold War: Their theories were so informed by bipolarity that they were unable to see the actual changes that would transform the state system. As international relations scholars are re-assessing their theories in a post-Cold War world, lawyers may do the same concerning …

The Nuremberg Roles Of Justice Robert H. Jackson, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

This lecture covers the background of Robert H. Jackson and the story of "Nuremberg," which is Jackson's Nuremberg. The program of this Nuremberg conference states that Prof. Barrett will speak about "The Crucial Role of Robert H. Jackson." In fact, there were multiple Jackson roles at Nuremberg—many, many roles and moments were encompassed in the undertaking that has come to be so significant historically that the primary, global meaning of the word "Nuremberg" today is, and probably always will be, the 1945-46 international trial of the principal surviving Nazi criminals. Justice Jackson's Nuremberg was over 15 months of full time …

Imagining Sovereignty, Managing Secession: The Legal Geography Of Eurasia's "Frozen Conflicts", Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

The interrelated concepts of sovereignty, self-determination, and the territorial integrity of states form a Gordian knot at the core of public international law. These concepts encompass not only how we define the classic actors of the international system—states—but also how seriously international law takes claims of civil and political rights. This Article considers how geographic concepts can be used to try to untangle—or slice through this knot of issues.

The frozen conflicts of Eurasia are a series of ongoing secessionist crises in the post-Soviet states of Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. I will use the example of the so-called "frozen conflict" …

Judging International Judgments, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

What effect should rulings of international courts have in domestic courts? In the U.S., debate has centered on a series of rulings by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the application of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR). The VCCR, a multilateral treaty that the United States ratified in 1969, grants foreign nationals the right to seek the assistance of their consulates in the event that local authorities arrest them. An Optional Protocol to the VCCR gives the ICJ jurisdiction over disputes relating to the interpretation and application of the treaty. Since the late 1990s, the ICJ repeatedly …

Women As Architects Of Peace: Gender And The Resolution Of Armed Conflict, Margaret E. Mcguiness

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Any attempts to redress the harms women experience as a result of armed conflict must include a role for women in peace processes. The many excellent contributions to this symposium help us understand the complex ways in which gender affects, and is affected by, armed conflict. The end to a conflict may come too late to heal or adequately redress many gender-specific injuries: the psychological fall out and physical damage of sex-related war crimes, the permanent displacement of women and children from their homes, the destruction of families and livelihoods. Moreover, peace processes—the informal and formal mechanisms through which …

Sanchez-Llamas, American Human Rights Exceptionalism And The Vccr Norm Portal, Margaret E. Mcguiness

Faculty Publications

This Essay examines Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon within the line of cases challenging U.S. non-compliance with the notification requirements of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR). The VCCR litigations arose as a response to American death penalty exceptionalism. Viewed through the lens of transnational efforts to integrate international human rights norms into the United States, Sanchez-Llamas illuminates the ways in which American human rights exceptionalism—in its many forms—is being actively contested and how judges—implicitly and explicitly—respond to arguments for and against exceptionalism.

Participatory Constitution Making In Post-Conflict States, Angela M. Banks

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Contribution Of The Special Court For Sierra Leone To The Development Of International Law, Charles Chernor Jalloh

Faculty Publications

This article is the first major study examining whether the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) has made, or is making, any contribution to the development of international law. The author concludes that it has. In this vein, he analyzes the creation of the Defence Office, the Legacy Phase Working Group and the Outreach Section to show that some of the structural novelties introduced through SCSL practice have proven to be worthy of replication within other international criminal courts. Taking as an example the controversy regarding the United Nations Security Council’s power to create ad hoc international criminal tribunals, the …

Book Review Of Can Might Make Rights? Building The Rule Of Law After Military Interventions, Lan Cao

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Internalizing Gender: Why International Law Theory Should Adopt Comparative Methods, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

This Article uses the example of international women 's political rights to examine the value of comparative methodologies in analyzing the process by which nations internalize international norms. As internalized in Brazil and France, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women suggests possibilities for (and possible limitations of) interdisciplinary comparative and international law scholarship. Indeed, international law scholarship is divided between theories of internalization and neorealist challenges to those theories. Comparative methodologies add crucial complexity to internalization theory, the success of which depends on acknowledging vast differences in national legal cultures. Further, comparative methodologies expose …

Sovereignty, Identity, And The Apparatus Of Death, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, the government issued broad new laws outlawing the use of ethnic categories, with a view to uniting all Rwandans under a single Rwandan identity. This self-erasure of ethnic identity is deployed primarily within the borders of the state, to enable reconciliation after the genocide in 1994. Outside the borders, the state deploys ethnic identity as one of the rationales for its cross-border wars (in the Democratic Republic of Congo).

From The Exile Files: An Essay On Trading Justice For Peace, Michael P. Scharf

Faculty Publications

In the spring and summer of 2003, the United States offered exile in lieu of invasion and prosecution to two rogue leaders accused of committing international crimes - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (who declined) and Liberian President Charles Taylor (who accepted). In this essay, the author argues that the offer to Hussein was inappropriate, as it violated international treaties requiring prosecution, but that the offer to Taylor was permissible under international law. The essay examines the costs and benefits of amnesty and exile-for-peace deals and the limited nature of the international duty to prosecute. Where the duty to prosecute does …

Contesting The "Sovereigntists": How To Learn To Stop Worrying And Love International Institutions, Margaret E. Mcguinness

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

It has become fashionable in some quarters of the United States to denounce the "outsourcing" of American sovereignty to international courts, the United Nations (UN), and the World Trade Organization (WTO).The central debate between these "sovereigntists" opposed to broad U.S. participation in international organizations (IOs) and "internationalists" who support such participation is not over the legal effect of conferring governmental functions on international institutions, but rather over the implications of such conferrals for democracy and national security: Does participation in international institutions strengthen or weaken U.S. democracy? Do IOs limit the ability of the government to protect national security? …