International Law Commons^™

Hong Kong's Reintegration Into The People's Republic Of China, Anne M. Seibel, Stacy A. Feld

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Every other year, the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law presents a symposium on a current topic in international law and practice. This year's symposium, "Hong Kong's Reintegration into the People's Republic of China: Constitutional Issues, Policy Approaches & Human Rights Concerns and Economic & Legal Implications, was held at Vanderbilt University School of Law on March 28-29, 1997. Our goal was to provide a forum in which leading authorities on Hong Kong and China could come together and discuss constitutional, human rights, legal, and economic concerns surrounding the reintegration of Hong Kong into China.

The results of this Symposium have …

South Africa's 1996 Choice On Termination Of Pregnancy Act, Audrey E. Haroz

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

South Africa's Bill of Rights is one of the most liberal and elaborate in the world. Consequently, South Africa is at the forefront of defining human rights for individuals, especially women. Concurrently, international law is slowly undergoing a reconceptualization of human rights documents and guarantees to define a more definitive, protective, and pro-active body of rights for women.

By upholding the constitutionality of the 1996 Abortion Act, South Africa can define its own Bill of Rights in liberal terms and ensure that the South African Constitution continues to receive a broad interpretation. A welcome result would be the improvement of …

International Law In Mexican Courts, Jorge Cicero

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Recognizing the increasing importance of international law in Mexico, this Article addresses the actual and potential uses of international law in Mexican courts. The Article reviews the ways in which the Mexican system already ensures the judicial consideration of international undertakings, as well as areas of possible improvements. The Article first considers the role and status of international law in the Mexican legal order, including the domestic status of international treaties and agreements, as well as the interaction between national and international norms. Next, the Article focuses on ways to ensure the consideration of international legal questions by Mexico's high …

Neither Free Nor Fair: The 1996 Bosnian Elections And The Failure Of The U.N. Election-Monitoring Mission, Christopher A. Riley

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The international community faced a difficult challenge after the Dayton Peace Accords ended the civil war in Bosnia. Free and fair elections became an essential component to establishing a democratic government in the war-torn country. The United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe responded by carrying out Annex 3 of the Peace Accords, which called for such elections. The resultant election-monitoring mission in Bosnia, however, was unsuccessful The elections were held under improper conditions. Therefore, the Bosnian people lack confidence in the democratic process, which is necessary for long-term democracy.

Defining Religious Tolerance: German Policy Toward The Church Of Scientology, Emily A. Moseley

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Members of the Church of Scientology face persecution from the German government and its citizens, raising international concern over the rights of religious minorities in a country determined to overcome its Nazi past. The German Constitution provides many protections for religious freedom and also allows a relatively close relationship between church and state. Historically, the German state has been closely intertwined with the traditionally dominant churches, and today Germans enjoy a great deal of freedom of religion. Until very recently, however, the Federal Constitutional Court has not upheld the similar freedom from religion guaranteed by the "establishment clause" in the …

Swapping Amnesty For Peace And The Duty To Prosecute Human Rights Crimes, Diane Orentlicher

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

International Criminal Law And The Cambodian Killing Fields, Diane Orentlicher

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Mergers And Acquisitions In The European Community And The United States: A Movement Toward A Uniform Enforcement Body, David Snyder

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Accountability For Past Abuses, Juan E. Mendez

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Creation Of South Africa's Constitution: Introduction, Stephen J. Ellmann

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

"And The Truth Shall Make You Free": Truth As A First Amendment Defense In Tortious Interference With Contract Cases, Robert L. Tucker

Akron Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Frozen Rights In Canada: Constitutional Interpretation And The Trickster, John Borrows

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dumping And Anti-Dumping In International Trade Origins, Legal Nature, And Evolution Developments In Brazil And In The United States, Luiz Claudio Duarte

LLM Theses and Essays

Dumping is when an exporting country sells their goods in the foreign market for less than the price of the goods in their own domestic market. Dumping has a negative connotation because it threatens domestic industries in the importing country. In response to harmful dumping situations, mechanisms of defense have been developed to protect nations from unfair trade practices. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) recognizes in Article VI anti-dumping tariffs as a legitimate defense to protect domestic industries from foreign predatory pricing practices. This paper focuses on anti-dumping developments in international trade since the beginning of the …

International Jurisdiction In Products Liability Cases (Analysis Of Asahi And Post-Asahi Cases), Tsutomu Kuribayashi

LLM Theses and Essays

With the increase of foreign trade, there has also been an increase in the number of foreign manufacturers and distributors involved in product liability litigation in the United States. In many cases, the products from these foreign manufacturers and distributors reach the forum states through the stream of commerce, and are distributed to the customers by regional distributors, wholesalers, and retailers. Therefore, in many product liability cases where defective products from these foreign manufacturers and distributors cause injuries to people in the United States, those foreign companies do not have a direct relationship with the forum states. In these cases, …

The Issue Of The Legal Validity Of Using Economic Sanctions To Enforce Human Rights, Thomas Hailu

LLM Theses and Essays

The international legal regime as it pertains to human rights is neither as established nor as definitive as it appears. It suffers from many disadvantages, the first and most important of which is the fact that the international legal regime has never been capable of effectively enforcing its rules or instituting appropriate remedies for its breaches. Some states have attempted to make up for this inability on behalf of international law by undertaking an enforcement mechanism either unilaterally or multilaterally; economic sanctions are often regarded as valuable tools of enforcement to be used against countries which are allegedly engaged in …

Federal Reserve: History, Purposes And Functions - An Analysis, Mukunda Lakshamanarao

LLM Theses and Essays

On December 23, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Federal Reserve Act. With this law, Congress established a central banking system which would enable the world’s most powerful industrial nation to manage its money and credit more effectively than ever before. The political and legislative struggle to create the Federal Reserve System was long and often bitter, and this final product in 1913 was the result of a carefully crafted and somewhat tenuous political compromise between national and regional powers. Since its founding, the Federal Reserve System has evolved to meet the needs of a changing financial system …

The Role Of The Organization Of African Unity (Oau) In Regional Conflict Resolution And Dispute Settlement, Peter Mweti Munya

LLM Theses and Essays

The emergence of an artificially constructed modern state with internal contradictions, sophisticated state apparatus, and weaponry, coupled with external forces has made Africa one of the most unstable regions in the world, and peace prospects a daunting task. The post-cold war era punctuated by forces of economic liberalization and dominance of the Breton Woods institutions in the economic management of the developing countries has not only accelerated the economic marginalization of Africa placing her at the fringes of the global economy but also wrought insecurity in their wake. This post-cold war and serves to emphasize the need for the OAU …

The Coming Fresh Water Crisis: International Legal And Institutional Responses, Stephen C. Mccaffrey

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Copyright And International Trips Compliance (Symposium: Fifth Annual Conference On International Intellectual Property Law And Policy), Shira Perlmutter, Jerome H. Reichman, Whitmore Gray

Other Publications

MS. PERLMUTTER: We have heard today about copyright in two different regions of the world, in Central and Eastern Europe' and in China. In recent years there has been an increasing convergence in the substance of national laws in different regions of the world. One of the major factors has been the TRIPs Agreement? I will focus on the current efforts toward implementing the TRIPs Agreement, and this will be a procedure-oriented talk.

Making International Refugee Law Relevant Again: A Proposal For Collectivized And Solution-Oriented Protection, James C. Hathaway, R. Alexander Neve

Articles

International refugee law is in crisis. Even as armed conflict and human rights abuse continue to force individuals and groups to flee their home countries, many governments are withdrawing from the legal duty to provide refugees with the protection they require. While governments proclaim a willingness to assist refugees as a matter of political discretion or humanitarian goodwill, they appear committed to a pattern of defensive strategies designed to avoid international legal responsibility toward involuntary migrants. Some see this shift away from a legal paradigm of refugee protection as a source for enhanced operational flexibility in the face of changed …

"Toward The Reformulation Of International Refugee Law" Research Report 1992-1997, James C. Hathaway

Other Publications

Discussions of the crisis in international refugee protection are frequently characterized by rhetorical excess, in which some ascribe all problems to malevolent states, while others are equally insistent that fraudulent asylum-seekers are solely to blame. This study was based, in contrast, on a recognition of the real systemic difficulties that jeopardize the viability of refugee protection. Its purpose was to devise a principled yet pragmatic way to reconcile state interests to the continued importance of access to asylum for those who need it.

The essence of our thesis is that the withdrawal of states from their legal responsibility to protect …

Regulating The Use Of Force In The 21st Century: The Continuing Importance Of State Autonomy, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

The most important, and certainly the most ambitious, modification of international law in this century has been the outlawing of the use of force to settle international disputes. The definitive prohibition on the use of force came with the adoption of the United Nations Charter and, in particular, Charter article 2(4).

For a short while, from 1991 until 1994, it appeared that a majority of Security Council members had re-interpreted the Charter's order of priorities. To some, it seemed that the Council had placed such values as human rights, self-determination, and even democracy above the value of peace through respect …

The Passive Virtues And The World Court: Pro-Dialogic Abstention By The International Court Of Justice, Antonio F. Perez

Scholarly Articles

Only a few years ago the International Court of Justiceseemed to be edging toward judicial activism. This article argues that in its most recent pronouncements the ICJ has instead employed a variety of techniques for abstention. The ICJ's use of this "arsenal of devices" recalls, however, Alexander Bickel's argument for the exercise of judicial restraint by the U.S. Supreme Court in a way that nonetheless allows the judicial organ to stimulate constitutional politics. In the recent contentious cases and advisory opinions concerning the status of East Timor, exploitation of the natural resources of Nauru, and a trilogy of nuclear testing …

Fame, The Founding, And The Power To Declare War, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Almost without discussion, and essentially without opposition, the Framers and Ratifiers of the United States Constitution vested in Congress the "Power ... To declare War, [and] grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal." During the past fifty years, one of the fiercest controversies in constitutional law has concerned what the Founders meant by this grant. It is a debate that has had, and that continues to have, dramatic importance. When Presidents committed troops or prepared to commit troops in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and, most recently, Bosnia, they claimed that the Constitution did not require them to seek …

The "Original Intent" Of U.S. International Taxation, Michael J. Graetz, Michael M. O'Hear

Faculty Scholarship

The Sixteenth Amendment took effect on February 25, 1913, permitting Congress to tax income "from whatever source derived," and on October 3rd of that year, Congress approved a tax on the net income of individuals and corporations. The United States regime for taxing international income took shape soon thereafter, during the decade 1919-1928. In the Revenue Act of 1918, the United States enacted, for the first time anywhere in the world, a credit against U.S. income for taxes paid by a U.S. citizen or resident to any foreign government on income earned outside the United States. The Revenue Act of …

Book Review, S. James Anaya

Publications

No abstract provided.

Asteroids And Comets: U.S. And International Law And The Lowest-Probability, Highest Consequence Risk, Michael B. Gerrard, Anna W. Barber

Faculty Scholarship

Asteroids and comets pose unique policy problems. They are the ultimate example of a low probability, high consequence event: no one in recorded human history is confirmed to have ever died from an asteroid or a comet, but the odds are that at some time in the next several centuries (and conceivably next year) an asteroid or a comet will cause mass localized destruction and that at some time in the coming half million years (and conceivably next year), an asteroid or a comet will kill several billion people. The sudden extinction of the dinosaurs, and most other species 65 …

What Price Peace: From Nuremberg To Bosnia To The Nobel Peace Prize, Malvina Halberstam

Articles

No abstract provided.

Cyberspace Sovereignty? – The Internet And The International System, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

By linking with the Internet, we don't mean absolute freedom of information. I think there is a general understanding about this. If you go through customs, you have to show your passport. It's the same with management of information. There is no contradiction at all between the development of telecommunications …