International Law Commons^™

A Sovereign Peace: Reconceptualizing The Law Of Sovereignty In The Taiwan Strait, Alyssa Resar

International Law Studies

China and Taiwan’s enduring dispute stems from a fundamental disagreement over Taiwan’s sovereignty. Drawing on binary conceptions of sovereignty in international law, the Chinese government argues that there can only be one legitimate Chinese sovereign—and that China is this sovereign. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s current government maintains that the Republic of China (Taiwan’s official title) is itself a sovereign, independent entity. As the two governments cling fiercely to their positions, bilateral diplomacy has ceased, and the risk of catastrophic war has risen.

This article argues that international law nonetheless offers the conceptual tools needed to build peace in the Taiwan Strait by …

Between Borders And Bodies: Sovereignty, Universality, And The Crisis Of Enforcement In International Law, Aliaa Riad Hassanien Aliaa Riad

Theses and Dissertations

Atrocities such as genocide and war crimes persist not despite international law, but within its very structure. Although international law is designed to protect humanity, it repeatedly fails to do so due to its inability to enforce its most fundamental norms. In the absence of enforcement, the law exists—but merely stands still. This failure stems from the structural contradictions embedded in the system—specifically, the tension between the principles of sovereignty and universality. As a result, international law has become a selective, politicized, and ineffective framework. Incidents such as the Rwandan genocide and the civil wars in Syria and Sudan demonstrate …

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 …

Mandatory Cooperation Under International Law, Evan J. Criddle, Evan Fox-Decent

Faculty Publications

Humanity in the twenty-first century faces serious global challenges and crises, including pandemics, nuclear proliferation, violent extremism, refugee migration, and climate change. None of these calamities can be averted without robust international cooperation. Yet, national leaders often assume that because their states are sovereign under international law, they are free to opt in or out of international cooperation as they see fit. This book challenges conventional wisdom by showing that international law requires states to cooperate with one another to address matters of international concern – even in the absence of treaty-based obligations. Within the past several decades, requirements to …

Citizen Shareholders: The State As A Fiduciary In International Investment Law, Eleanor L. Thompson

Michigan Law Review

International investment law provides stability for investors, helps capital flow across the globe, and can be a critical tool for sustainable development. This regime, however, has become increasingly controversial, in part due to its inability to reconcile investor obligations with competing human rights obligations. International investment treaties provide substantive guarantees to investors, including submission to binding arbitration in the event of breach. When found in breach of one of these guarantees, international investment arbitral tribunal awards are often in the hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially creating “regulatory chill” for states that may otherwise take affirmative action to protect human …

Like Oil And Water: How The Guyana-Venezuela Border Dispute Impacts Foreign Oil Investors, Aisha Jehaludi

University of Miami Business Law Review

Guyana, a hidden gem located on the northern coast of South America, is an emergent nation primarily known as the land of many waters. However, in 2015, this hidden gem captured international attention when the country struck liquid gold: oil. The discovery put Guyana on the map as an attractive foreign investment opportunity, and over the last ten years, Guyana has gone from being one of the poorest nations in South America to the nation with the world’s fastest growing economy.

This economic boom, fueled by foreign oil companies, also caught the attention of Guyana’s neighboring country, Venezuela. On December …

Exorcising Hobbes’S Ghost: A Future For Constitutional And International Law, Monica Hakimi

Michigan Law Review

A review of Law for Leviathan: Constitutional Law, International Law, and the State. By Daryl Levinson.

In The Shadows Of Sovereignty: An Analysis Of The Legality Of The Memorandum Of Understanding Between Ethiopia And Somaliland, Nathan Yost

American University International Law Review

This Comment examines the legality of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Ethiopia and the unrecognized territory of Somaliland. It analyzes whether Somaliland satisfies the criteria for statehood under the Montevideo Convention and argues that the MoU is valid despite Somaliland’s lack of formal recognition. The Comment also evaluates Ethiopia’s obligations under customary international law and its commitments to the United Nations and African Union, addressing concerns about Somalia’s territorial integrity while affirming Somaliland’s right to self-determination. The Comment will begin by providing an overview of Somaliland’s bid for statehood and the strategic motivations behind the MoU. It will then …

Anchoring Digital Sovereignty, Vivek Krishnamurthy

Publications

For a quarter-century, a consensus has prevailed that territorial sovereignty applies online as it does offline. Since practically all the Internet's infrastructure and its billions of users reside on the territory of states, conventional wisdom holds that sovereignty must extend to cyberspace. Such accounts ignore how people experience cyberspace as a distinctive place, and how current international law lacks safeguards to prevent states from exercising their sovereignty to splinter the Internet into a set of national networks. Territorial sovereignty is also hard to square with pledges by the world's democracies to keep the Internet free, open, and global; yet it …

The Protection Of Legitimate Expectations In International Law, Halil Rahman Basaran

San Diego International Law Journal

The argument of this Article is that international law has still not reached a stage wherein the protection of legitimate expectations can become a general principle of law. In that respect, the most favorable terrain for the protection of legitimate expectations, namely, inter-state negotiations, still largely remains outside international law. In pursuing this argument, this Article first examines the notions of national sovereignty, legal institution and inter-state boundaries. This paper then looks at the notion of general principles of law and highlights the principle of equity. Finally, the Article discusses the Bolivia v. Chile case and places international investment law …

Evolving Sovereignty Relationships Between Affiliated Jurisdictions: Lessons For Native American Jurisdictions, Vaughan Carter, Charlotte Ku, Andrew P. Morriss

Faculty Scholarship

Though sovereignty is principally associated with governance over a territory and freedom to act in the international arena, this article examines sovereignty as empowerment. The study tests the applicability to Native American jurisdictions of the experiences of fifteen case study jurisdictions presently associated with the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France in shared sovereign relationships. The focus is on the evolution of those relationships and opportunities for development where jurisdictions do not attain full control over their affairs. The case studies examine the relationships from the perspectives of political, economic, and cultural sovereignty. The article further examines the relationships in …

Repurposing The United Nations Trusteeship Council To Govern The Establishment Of Outer Space Settlements, Andrew Wulf

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Current existing international law and treaties on outer space do not address or regulate private actors’ property claims or human settlements in outer space. American companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, as well as countries like the United States, Russia, and China, are seeking to create colonies on the Moon and Mars. However, there is no international legal authority to allow or regulate this. In order to legitimize and control this impending outgrowth of human settlements, this paper proposes that the U.N. Trusteeship Council be repurposed to govern non-state actors’ claims of outer space property.

First, this paper explains …

Third World Statehood Before The ‘Third World’: Imperialism, Sovereignty, And The Making Of Latin America, Eric Loefflad

National Law School of India Review

Engaging BS Chimni’s claim that the genealogies of colonial capitalism are vital to uncovering the substantive realities that animate formalistic conceptions of jurisdiction, I argue that the independence of Latin America forms an important, yet under- theorised, site for articulating these genealogies. This is especially significant given the general lack of materialist analysis of this history in both Latin American International Law (LAIL) and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL’). Filling this lacuna, I argue that while Latin American polities emerged as bounded territorial states, their recognition as such must be understood in relation to how Europe and the …

Colonialism, Jurisdiction, And Sovereignty In Palestine, Usha Natarajan

National Law School of India Review

Knowledge production is never neutral, and academia – much like international laws and institutions among other social structures – is a key conduit for the efficient operations of power. Israel’s longstanding occupation and settler colonialism in Palestine challenges mainstream accounts of the international laws of jurisdiction, whereas Chimni’s TWAIL analysis better accounts for and predicts the imperial operations of such laws and points to fruitful evolution towards fairness and justice.10 I elaborate by considering firstly the exercise of jurisdiction during occupation and settler colonialism, and secondly the exercise of universal jurisdiction by states. I conclude with some thoughts on jurisdiction …

Sovereignty, International Law, And The Princely States Of Colonial South Asia By Priyasha Saksena (Oxford University Press 2023), Aryan Tulsyan, Prabhash Ranjan

National Law School Journal

Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia by Priyasha Saksena is a significant academic intervention into understanding South Asia. The author maps how the various actors—the princely states, the British Crown, the East India Company (the company), and the anti-colonial nationalists—used international law, especially the vernacular of sovereignty, to advance their arguments and achieve their goals during the colonial struggle.

The Right To Migrate, Matthew J. Lindsay

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Since the late-19th century, the Supreme Court has insisted that the preservation of national sovereignty requires a constitutional chasm between immigration law and ordinary law. If the Court is to bridge that chasm, it must reimagine the longstanding premise of the federal immigration power that the presence of noncitizens in U.S. territory menaces the nation’s sovereignty and security. This Article contributes to that reimagining by chronicling a compelling alternative worldview with a venerable historical pedigree—that of a quintessentially American right to migrate.

During the Founding Era, American statesmen described the impoverished subjects of Europe’s monarchies as protagonists in an unfolding …

Fractional Sovereignty, Roger Michalski

Faculty Articles

The axiomatic beginning of every conflict of laws case is that a court must choose the law of one sovereign and disregard the law of all other sovereigns. One wins, gets to set the rules and regulate behavior, all others lose. This all-or-nothing scenario is the result of enshrining an old view of indivisible sovereignty into conflict of laws rules. The Article begins by explaining how this happened. Despite the importance of this assumption of indivisibility, no articles have examined why and how it became enshrined in conflict of laws doctrine. All too often it is treated as a truism …

Unsettling Human Rights Clinical Pedagogy And Practice In Settler Colonial Contexts, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Caroline Bishop Laporte

Articles

In settler colonial contexts, law and educational institutions operate as structures of oppression, extraction, erasure, disempowerment, and continuing violence against colonized peoples. Consequently, clinical legal advocacy often can reinforce coloniality--the logic that perpetuates structural violence against individuals and groups resisting colonization and struggling for survival as peoples. Critical legal theory, including Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”), has long exposed colonial laws and practices that entrench discriminatory, racialized power structures and prevent transformative international human rights advocacy. Understanding and responding to these critiques can assist in decolonizing international human rights clinical law teaching and practice but is insufficient in …

Politik Hukum Pengambilalihan Flight Information Region (Fir) Dari Singapura, Canris Bahri P.S

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Sovereignty is one of the conditions for the establishment of a country, the sovereignty of the state is the full and highest power in a country to regulate its entire territory which includes land, water and air space above it without interference from the governments of other countries. State sovereignty in airspace based on the 1944 Chicago convention on International Civil Aviation is "Complete" and "Exclusive". Recognition of the Archipelago's Sovereignty based on the 1982 International Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) also includes the air space above it. However, there are problems that arise in the implementation …

Another Look At The Concept Of Nation-State Borders In The Time Of Covid And Ukraine, John J. Chung

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Law And Politics Of Ransomware, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

What do Lady Gaga, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, the city of Valdez in Alaska, and the court system of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul all have in common? They have all been victims of ransomware attacks, which are growing both in number and severity. In 2016, hackers perpetrated roughly four thousand ransomware attacks a day worldwide, a figure which was already alarming. By 2020, however, ransomware attacks reached a staggering number, between 20,000 and 30,000 per day in the United States alone. That is a ransomware attack every eleven seconds, each of which cost victims …

The Role Of Recognition In Kelsen's Account Of Legal Obligation And Political Duty, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Kelsen’s critique of absolute sovereignty famously appeals to a basic norm of international recognition. However, in his discussion of legal obligation, generally speaking, he notoriously rejects mutual recognition as having any normative consequence. I argue that this apparent contradiction in Kelsen's estimate regarding the normative force of recognition is resolved in his dynamic account of the democratic generation of law. Democracy is embedded within a modern political ethos that obligates legal subjects to recognize each other along four dimensions: as contractors whose mutually beneficial cooperation measures esteem by fair standards of contribution; as autonomous agents endowed with equal rights; as …

The Violence In Our Humanity: Principles, Action, And The Erosion Of State Sovereignty, Rasheed Idou

Theses and Dissertations

The past two decades have witnessed an increasing number of armed conflicts, both inter- and intra-nationally, and an even more increasing number of multilateral military interventions without UN Security Council authorization. Central to the discussion of these interventions are the themes of humanitarianism and state sovereignty. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between humanitarian imperatives and principles of sovereignty within the context of armed conflict to better understand the tensions that have led to the current global outcomes. In so doing, it identifies how humanitarian principles, imperatives, and actions have affected the contemporary conception of state …

Jus Gentium, Natural Law, And Grotius’ Treatise: The Impact Of International Law’S Classical Heritage On Today’S Enforcement Dilemma, Faith Chudkowski

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

No abstract provided.

Russia’S 2020 Constitutional Amendments And The Entrenchment Of The Moscow Patriarchate As A Lever Of Foreign Policy Soft Power, Robert C. Blitt

Book Chapters

Much has been written about the Kremlin’s embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church—Moscow Patriarchate (ROC) as a lever of soft power for advancing Russia’s foreign policy. Based on the substance of the constitutional amendments ratified in July 2020, this chapter reasons that the church-state partnership is poised to grow stronger and more entrenched in the coming years.

After briefly highlighting the energizing effect several key constitutional amendments are likely to have on existing Kremlin foreign policy objectives, this chapter offers an assessment of the ROC’s central role in disseminating and advocating these newly minted constitutional norms across its international platforms …

Grotian Moments And Statehood, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Grotian Moments are instances of accelerated formation of customary law, sparked by significant world events, such as wars, terrorist attacks, or natural catastrophes. This Article applies the Grotian Moment theory to the legal criteria of statehood, in an attempt to assess whether an evolution in specific elements of statehood has resulted in such paradigm-shifting Grotian Moments. In Part II, this Article analyzes the Grotian Moment theory while distinguishing it from other types of customary law formation. Part III focuses on the legal theory of statehood and each of its constitutive elements. Part IV discusses whether any such elements of statehood …

State Responsibility For International Bail-Jumping, Robert Currie, Elizabeth Matheson

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Over the last decade, there has been a spate of incidents in Canada and the United States involving Saudi Arabian nationals who, while out on bail for predominantly sexual crimes, were able to abscond from the countries despite having surrendered their passports. Investigation has revealed evidence supporting a reasonable inference that the government of Saudi Arabia has, in fact, assisted its nationals to escape on these occasions. This article makes the case that this kind of conduct amounts not just to unfriendly acts but also to infringements upon the territorial sovereignty of both states and serious breaches of the international …

Defend Forward & Sovereignty: How America’S Cyberwar Strategy Upholds International Law, Elya Taichman

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

To thwart a seemingly neve rending bombardment of cyberattacks, the U.S. Department of Defense recently implemented a new strategy – defending forward. This approach demands persistently engaging the enemy on a daily basis to disrupt cyber activity. Rather than waiting to be attacked, the United States is bringing the fight to the enemy. However, this strategy poses fascinating and complex questions of international law. In particular, because most defend forward operations fall within the gray zone of warfare, it remains unclear whether these operations violate the sovereignty of American adversaries or even third party nation states in whose cyberspace U.S. …

In Defense Of Pure Sovereignty In Cyberspace, Kevin Jon Heller

International Law Studies

States currently endorse three different positions concerning the international wrongfulness of cyber operations that penetrate computer systems located on the territory of another state but do not rise to the level of a use of force or prohibited intervention. The first position is that such low-intensity cyber operations are never wrongful, because sovereignty is a principle of international law, not a primary rule that can be independently violated. The second is that low-intensity cyber operations are always wrongful, because sovereignty is a primary rule of international law that is violated by any non-consensual penetration of a computer system located on …

Sovereign Authority And Rule Of Law: The Effect Of U.S. Use Of Torture On Political Legitimacy, Sydney Bradley

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Governmental sovereignty is created and maintained by mutual respect for the rule of law by the government and citizens. To maintain legitimacy, a government must act within the bounds of the contract that created it. Otherwise, the relationship founded by said contract would be nullified, as would the duties and obligations that flow from that relationship. Torture exemplifies an ultra vires act used by the United States to show the consequences of over-extended authority on political legitimacy and the rule of law. Founded on the philosophies of Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Christine Korsgaard, this research investigates the nature of …