International Law Commons^™

Call For Inputs: Climate Change And Human Rights: A Safe Climate, Sara L. Seck, Lisa Benjamin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

There is now global agreement that human rights norms apply to the full spectrum of environmental issues, including climate change. The previous Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, Mr. John Knox, developed Framework Principles on Human Rights and the Environment that set forth three sets of duties that engage both States and businesses: procedural obligations; substantive obligations; and obligations relating to those in vulnerable situations.

The current Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, Mr. David Boyd, is working to provide additional clarity regarding the substantive obligations relating to a range of elements that are essential to …

Impacts Of The Changing Ocean-Sea Ice System On The Key Forage Fish Arctic Cod (Boreogadus Saida) And Subsistence Fisheries In The Western Canadian Arctic—Evaluating Linked Climate, Ecosystem And Economic (Cee) Models, Nadja S. Steiner, William W. L. Cheung, Andres M. Cisneros-Montemayor, Helen Drost, Hakase Hayashida, Carie Hoover, Jen Lam, Tessa Sou, U. Rashid Sumaila, Paul Suprenand, Travis C. Tai, David Vanderzwaag

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This study synthesizes results from observations, laboratory experiments and models to showcase how the integration of scientific methods and indigenous knowledge can improve our understanding of (a) past and projected changes in environmental conditions and marine species; (b) their effects on social and ecological systems in the respective communities; and (c) support management and planning tools for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The study links climate-ecosystem-economic (CEE) models and discusses uncertainties within those tools. The example focuses on the key forage species in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (Western Canadian Arctic), i.e., Arctic cod (Boreogadus saida). Arctic cod can be …

Advancing Research For The Management Of Long-Lived Species: A Case Study On The Greenland Shark, Jena E. Edwards, Elizabeth Hiltz, Franziska Broell, Peter G. Bushnell, Steven E. Campana, Jørgen S. Christiansen, Brynn M. Devine, Jeffrey J. Gallant, Kevin J. Hedges, M. Aaron Macneil, Bailey C. Mcmeans, Julius Nielsen, Kim Præbel, Gregory B. Skomal, John F. Steffensen, Ryan P. Walter, Yuuki Y. Watanabe, David Vanderzwaag, Nigel E. Hussey

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Long-lived species share life history traits such as slow growth, late maturity, and low fecundity, which lead to slow recovery rates and increase a population’s vulnerability to disturbance. The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) has recently been recognized as the world’s longest-lived vertebrate, but many questions regarding its biology, physiology, and ecology remain unanswered. Here we review how current and future research will fill knowledge gaps about the Greenland shark and provide an overall framework to guide research and management priorities for this species. Key advances include the potential for specialized aging techniques and demographic studies to shed light …

Book Review: Not Enough: Human Rights In An Unequal World, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

Review of the book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. By Samuel Moyn. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press 2018. Pp. ix, 220. Index.

Social Cost Of Carbon In Environmental Impact Assessment, Meinhard Doelle

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

While the social cost of carbon (SCC) has played a prominent role in regulatory decision-making in recent years, use in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) realm has been minimal. This article explores potential roles for SCC in EIA. Using Canada’s proposed new federal impact assessment (IA) regime as a basis, the analysis examines how a jurisdiction could employ SCC to integrate climate change considerations into project-level assessment and decision-making. Potential roles are first discussed in relation to the broad purposes of IA, before focusing on key assessment factors such as consideration of economic costs and benefits, cumulative effects, climate change …

The Heart Of The Paris Rulebook: Communicating Ndcs And Accounting For Their Implementation, Meinhard Doelle

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Nationally Determined Contributions play a critical role in the architecture of the Paris Agreement. Parties are required to prepare and communicate their NDCs and to undertake domestic efforts to meet their mitigation commitments, facilitated in some cases by support and finance from other parties. The focus of this article is on key elements of the five-year cycle that deal with the content and process of NDCs, specifically the portion of the Paris Rulebook on the communication of NDCs and the accounting for their implementation. The article concludes that while the basics appear to be in place, there are a number …

What Is International Trade Law For?, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

Events of the past few years, including the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and election of Donald Trump as President in the United States, have reignited debates about the global trade regime. In particular, many have begun to question whether the trade regime has done enough for those who feel left behind by globalization. While some have held fast to the view that redistribution of trade’s gains is primarily a matter of domestic policy, others have suggested tweaks to the international trade agreements aimed at better spreading the wealth.

But what if …

Fragmentation, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

A danger, an opportunity, passé, a cliché, destabilizing, empowering, destructive, creative: Depending on whom you ask, fragmentation has meant any and all of these for international law. The concept of fragmentation has been a mirror reflecting international lawyers’ perception of themselves, their field, and its prospects for the future.

This chapter chronicles fragmentation’s meanings over the past few decades. In particular, it focuses on the spreading fears of fragmentation around the millennium, how the fears were eventually repurposed, where, speculatively, those fear may have gone, and how and to what extent faith in international law was restored.

...And Trade, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

This short essay, part of a symposium on Gregory Shaffer’s Retooling Trade Agreements for Social Inclusion, argues that the normal science of trade law lacks the tools to confront trade law’s greatest current challenges. Instead, breaking out of trade law’s two-step politics, with its division of “growing the pie” and distributing its slices, and responding to new challenges of climate change, the digital economy, and artificial intelligence will require a new politics built on and designed to build new shared narratives embodying new policy paradigms.

Legal Consequences Of The Separation Of The Chagos Archipelago From Mauritius In 1965, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

Decolonization and its quite valid discontents lay at the center of the recent International Court of Justice advisory opinion regarding the territory and populations of the Chagos Archipelago, located in the Indian Ocean. Answering questions posed by the UN General Assembly, the concluded that because these islands were detached from Mauritius as a condition of independence, the decolonization of Mauritius had not been completed in accordance with international law. The Court further ruled unlawful the United Kingdom's continued administration of the Chagos Archipelago and called upon all UN member states to aid completion of the decolonization process. As detailed in …

Introduction To The Symposium On Julian Nyarko, “Giving The Treaty A Purpose: Comparing The Durability Of Treaties And Executive Agreements”, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

Part of the symposium on Julian Nyarko, “Giving the Treaty a Purpose: Comparing the Durability of Treaties and Executive Agreements”

Patent Law And The Emigration Of Innovation, Greg Day, Steven Udick

Scholarly Works

Legislators and industry leaders claim that patent strength in the United States has declined, causing firms to innovate in foreign countries. However, scholarship has largely dismissed the theory that foreign patents have any effect on where firms invent, considering that patent law is bound by strict territorial limitations (as a result, one cannot strengthen their patent protection by innovating abroad). In essence, then, industry leaders are deeply divided from scholarship about whether innovative firms seek out jurisdictions offering stronger patent rights, affecting the rate of innovation.

To resolve this puzzle, we offer a novel theory of patent rights — which …

Interstitial Space Law, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

Conventionally, customary international law is developed through the actions and beliefs of nations. International treaties are interpreted, in part, by assessing how the parties to the treaty behave. This Article observes that these forms of uncodified international law—custom and subsequent treaty practice—are also developed through a nation’s reactions, or failures to react, to acts and beliefs that can be attributed to it. I call this “attributed lawmaking.”

Consider the new commercial space race. Innovators like SpaceX and Blue Origin seek a permissive legal environment. A Cold-War-era treaty does not seem adequately to address contemporary plans for space. The treaty does, …

Corporations And Sustainability, Beate Sjåfjell, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

This chapter introduces the Handbook, providing an overview of its aims and structure, as well as the core research questions that the contributions to it collectively address. It discusses sustainability-related problems associated with the legal form of the corporation, and provides background on state-of-the-art research in natural sciences and other relevant fields that inform our understanding of sustainability. It concludes with specific research questions and a presentation of the Handbook’s structure.

Winning And Losing In Investor-State Arbitration, Tim Samples

Scholarly Works

As tensions between investors’ rights and sovereign power escalate, investor-state dispute settlement has become a focal point of backlash and controversy. As a result, ISDS now embodies two opposing currents in international law: (i) the erosion of sovereignty that accompanied economic globalization, trade frameworks, and investment treaties following the Second World War and (ii) more recently, reassertions of sovereignty prompted by recent backlashes against the global economic order. This Article measures and evaluates outcomes of the ISDS system for sovereign participants. Using the best available data, this Article contributes more detailed assessments of sovereign winners (home states of claimants) and …

Book Review: Global Lawmakers: International Organizations In The Crafting Of World Markets By Susan Block-Lieb And Terence C. Halliday, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

Susan Block-Lieb and Terence Halliday gradually build up an empirically grounded, meticulously realized argument that individual lawmakers matter. When one allows facts to inform theory rather than the other way around, the authors show, what becomes clear is that individual lawmakers are not just governmental delegates, but a whole variety of professionals, industry association representatives, and others with some stake in the lawmaking process. These actors work not just through formal processes, but also through an array of informal ones. Most importantly, their presence matters to the content of the legal norms that take hold around the world. The book …

Retour Sur L’Affaire De L’Alabama: De L’Utilité Et De L’Histoire Pour L'Arbitrage International, William W. Park, Bruno De Fumichon

Faculty Scholarship

For any aficionado of international law and international arbitration, the 1872 Alabama case represents a rich historical landmark, as promising a mine as the wreck of the Confederate Ship Alabama itself, sunk off Cherbourg, in 1864, by the United States Ship Kearsarge. This arbitration represents a turning point in relations between the United States and Great Britain, from repeated conflict to a “Special Relationship” that has grown stronger during the past century and a half. The case also marked the revival of international arbitration, after centuries of uncertainty. Not least, the case introduced long-lasting procedural innovations: the neutral collegial tribunal, …

Unity And Diversity In International Law, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

The primordial Greek sea-god Proteus could alter his shape at will, notwithstanding that his divine substance remained the same. Reinventing himself by adapting to new circumstances, Proteus still stayed unchanged in essence.

Unlike the sea-god’s protean nature, the substance of international law may well undergo alterations when examined through the telescope of legal culture, or with predispositions of divergent educational backgrounds. For the thoughtful reader, scholarly speculation on such variations will be triggered by reading Is International Law International?. In that book, Professor Anthea Roberts explores a variety of elements in the teaching and practice of international law, viewed …