International Law Commons^™

"Cerd-Ain" Reform: Dismantling The School-To-Prison Pipeline Through More Thorough Coordination Of The Departments Of Justice And Education, Lisa A. Rich

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

In the last year of his presidency, President Barack Obama and his administration have undertaken many initiatives to ensure that formerly incarcerated individuals have more opportunities to successfully reenter society. At the same time, the administration has been working on education policy that closes the achievement gap and slows the endless flow of juveniles into the school-to-prison pipeline. While certainly laudable, there is much more that can be undertaken collaboratively among executive branch agencies to end the school-to-prison pipeline and the endless cycle of people re-entering the criminal justice system.

This paper examines the rise of the school-to-prison pipeline through …

Free Trade, The Washington Consensus, And Bilateral Investment Treaties The South African Journey: A Rethink On The Rules On Foreign Investment By Developing Countries, Ziyad Motala

American University Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Shattering The Glass Ceiling In International Adjudication, Nienke Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

The Article shows that women are found in dramatically low numbers on the benches of the majority of the world’s most important international courts, analyzes the causes of this phenomenon and proposes and evaluates solutions. It establishes that the number of women in the pool of potential judges does not appear to dictate how many women become international judges. It shows, too, that when selection procedures are closed and opaque, and there is no quota or aspirational target for a sex-balanced bench, women obtain international judgeships in disproportionately low numbers. On the other hand, when a quota or aspirational target …

Achieving Sex-Representative International Court Benches, Nienke Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

Twenty-five years ago, in this Journal, Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright argued that the structures of international law “privilege men.”1 As shown in Table 1, which summarizes data from a forthcoming article, on nine of twelve international courts of varied size, subject-matter jurisdiction, and global and regional membership, women made up 20 percent or less of the bench in mid 2015.2 On many of these courts, the percentage of women on the bench has stayed constant, vacillated, or even declined over time.3 Women made up a lower percentage of the bench in mid 2015 than in previous years …

"What We Lose In Sales, We Make Up In Volume": The Faulty Logic Of The Financial Services Industry's Response To The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Proposed Rule Prohibiting Class Action Bans In Arbitration Clauses, Richard Frankel

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming.

Between Legitimacy And Control: Challenges And Recusals Of Arbitrators And Judges In International Courts And Tribunals, Chiara Giorgetti

Law Faculty Publications

Challenges of judges and arbitrators in international courts and tribunals is a vastly understudied subject. To correct this imbalance, this Article makes three novel contributions. First, and for the first time, it details and compares challenge procedures across a variety of international courts and tribunals, including both permanent and ad hoc institutions. Second, it provides unique data on challenges and provides a detailed analysis of their outcomes. Third, it makes two concrete recommendations that should be adopted as baseline requirements to improve and harmonize existing challenge procedures: (1) it proposes that an external or semi-external institution take decisions on challenges, …

Consent Is Not Enough: Why States Must Respect The Intensity Threshold In Transnational Conflict, Rebecca Crootof

Law Faculty Publications

It is widely accepted that a state cannot treat a struggle with an organized non-state actor as an armed conflict until the violence crosses a minimum threshold of intensity. For instance, during the recent standoff at the Oregon wildlife refuge, the U.S. government could have lawfully used force pursuant to its domestic law enforcement and human rights obligations, but President Obama could not have ordered a drone strike on the protesters. The reason for this uncontroversial rule is simple—not every riot or civil disturbance should be treated like a war.

But what if President Obama had invited Canada to bomb …

Change Without Consent: How Customary International Law Modifies Treaties, Rebecca Crootof

Law Faculty Publications

In 1903, Panama ceded its sovereign rights over the Panama Canal to the United States in perpetuity. The 1930 London Naval Treaty required submarines to comply with the contemporary law of war, including the prohibition on neutralizing enemy merchant vessels without having first ensured the safety of their passengers and crew. In 1945, the United Nations Charter prohibited its members from threatening or using force against another state, save for two limited exceptions. And, in 1969, Spain and Morocco concluded a permanent fisheries convention, setting the limit of their territorial seas at twelve miles.

Some of these treaties were bilateral …

Parental Kidnapping: An Epidemic That Is Escalating, Michael Samson

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note examines the complex legal and emotional challenges surrounding international parental child abduction, emphasizing the limitations of existing legal frameworks like The Hague Convention and the need for a more comprehensive approach to address this growing issue. It highlights the psychological and jurisdictional complexities involved, particularly when countries like China and Russia are not signatories to the Convention. The analysis advocates for stronger enforcement mechanisms, international cooperation, and preventive measures to protect children and families affected by such abductions.

Actic Law & Policy Year In Review: 2015, Craig H. Allen, Bridgette J. Cooper, Adam Murray

Articles

A review of significant legal developments affecting the Arctic, including treaties and other international agreements; actions by the U.S. Congress, President, and other federal agencies; developments from the European Union and ten foreign countries; and several international organizations. Also addressed are themes including arctic marine shipping; indigneous residents; marine resources; military activities; polar icebreakers; pollution prevention, response, and liability; and scientific research.

Legal Pathways To Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Under Section 115 Of The Clean Air Act, Michael Burger, Ann E. Carlson, Michael B. Gerrard, Jayni Foley Hein, Jason A. Schwartz, Keith J. Benes

Faculty Scholarship

Under President Barack Obama the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has promulgated a series of greenhouse gas emissions regulations, initiating the necessary national response to climate change. However, the United States will need to find other ways to reduce GHG emissions if it is to live up to its international emissions reduction pledges, and to ultimately lead the way to a zero-carbon energy future. This paper argues that the success of the recent climate negotiations in Paris provides a strong basis for invoking a powerful tool available to help achieve the country’s climate change goals: Section 115 of the Clean Air …

Rerum Novarum: New Things And Recent Paradigms Of Property Law, M C. Mirow

Faculty Publications

The two most recent paradigmatic moments in the development of property law were the construction of "social property" about a hundred years ago and of "international property" quite recently. This study analyses two important texts as illustrations of these changes: Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) and John Sprankling's book The International Law of Property (2014). Each text signals a paradigm shift in our understanding of property.

The Sad, Quiet Death Of Missouri V. Holland: How Bond Hobbled The Treaty Power, Michael J. Glennon, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

Many anticipated that Bond v. United States (2014) would confirm or overrule Justice Holmes’s canonical decision in Missouri v. Holland (1920). Bond is now considered to have done neither; rather, it purportedly elided the constitutional issue by applying the canon of constitutional avoidance to the treaty’s implementing legislation, thus resolving Bond on statutory grounds alone and leaving Holland’s validity for another day. We argue to the contrary that Bond eviscerated Holland. Chief Justice Roberts proceeded from the premise that “the statute — unlike the [treaty] — must be read consistent with principles of federalism inherent in our constitutional structure.” This …

The Business Of Treaties, Melissa (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

Business entities play important and underappreciated roles in the production of international treaties. At the same time, international treaty law is hobbled by state- centric presumptions that render its response to business ad hoc and unprincipled.

This Article makes three principal contributions. First, it draws from case studies to demonstrate the significance of business participation in treaty production. The descriptive account invites a shift from attention to traditional lobbying at the domestic level and private standard-setting at the transnational level to the ways business entities have become autonomous international actors, using a panoply of means to transform their preferred policies …

A Hitchhiker’S Guide To The Oecd’S International Vat/Gst Guidelines, Walter Hellerstein

Scholarly Works

The OECD’s International VAT/GST Guidelines, which were released in their consolidated form at the OECD’s Global Forum on VAT in Paris in late 2015, are the culmination of nearly two decades of efforts to provide internationally accepted standards for consumption taxation of cross-border trade, particularly trade in services and intangibles. This article provides a roadmap to the Guidelines, especially for readers who may be unfamiliar with consumption tax principles, in general, or VATs in particular. Part II of the article provides the background to the Guidelines, describing the basic features of a VAT, the problems with which the Guidelines are …

Children, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This chapter, which appears in The Cambridge Companion to International Criminal Law (William A. Schabas ed. 2016), discusses how international criminal law instruments and institutions address crimes against and affecting children. It contrasts the absence of express attention in the post-World War II era with the multiple provisions pertaining to children in the 1998 Statute of the International Criminal Court. The chapter examines key judgments in that court and in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, as well as the ICC’s current, comprehensive approach to the effects that crimes within its jurisdiction have on children. The chapter concludes with a …

The Business Of Treaties, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

Business entities play important and underappreciated roles in the production of international treaties. At the same time, international treaty law is hobbled by state-centric presumptions that render its response to business ad hoc and unprincipled.

This Article makes three principal contributions. First, it draws from case studies to demonstrate the significance of business participation in treaty production. The descriptive account invites a shift from attention to traditional lobbying at the domestic level and private standard-setting at the transnational level to the ways business entities have become autonomous international actors, using a panoply of means to transform their preferred policies into …

Competing For Refugees: A Market-Based Solution To A Humanitarian Crisis, Joseph Blocher, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

The current refugee crisis demands novel legal solutions, and new ways of summoning the political will to implement them. As a matter of national incentives, the goal must be to design mechanisms that discourage countries of origin from creating refugees, and encourage host countries to welcome them. One way to achieve this would be to recognize that persecuted refugee groups have a financial claim against their countries of origin, and that this claim can be traded to host nations in exchange for acceptance. Modifications to the international apparatus would be necessary, but the basic legal elements of this proposal already …

The Problematic Applicability Of Subsidiarity To International Law, Paolo G. Carozza

Journal Articles

This article seeks to explore some of the reasons why the principle of subsidiarity, although applicable in some sectors of international law and particularly in the field of international human rights law, has difficulty in serving as a general principle of public international law more broadly. The obstacles to advancing a more robust understanding of subsidiarity's place in the current structure of global norms and institutions include: the normative and institutional fragmentation of international law; the continuing centrality of state sovereignty in the international legal system; and the endemic weaknesses and incapacity of states and sub-state communities with respect to …

The Law On Lethal Force Begins With The Right To Life, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

In August 2015, the UK government intentionally killed a criminal suspect and the bystanders with him using a drone-launched Hellfire missile in Syria. In doing so, the UK violated the right to life of all three men because the UK had no lawful basis for deploying military force in Syria. Even if it did, international humanitarian law, governing the conduct of armed conflict, prohibits assassination – the intentional killing of an individual for reasons other than advancing a legitimate military objective. In any actual cases of ambiguity, the legal presumption in international law is with peace and protection of the …

International Legal Protections For Migrants And Refugees: A Response To Father Brennan, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

Father Brennan’s Essay, “Human Rights and the National Interest: The Case Study of Asylum, Migration, and National Border Protection,” is a complex legal and ethical analysis of refugee law. This Commentary focuses on one aspect of the international law relevant to the Essay, namely, state obligations to migrants. Father Brennan’s main argument that migrants and refugees may be turned back, so long as the action respects human rights law, is consistent with the human right to life. Justly stopping migrants and refugees requires states to stop them before they enter either international waters or the state’s territorial waters. Further, Father …

Bringing International Tax Policy Into The 21st Century, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

Michael J. Graetz delivered the following remarks at the Tax Policy Center's "A Corporate Tax for the 21st Century" conference on July 14 in Washington. These remarks are substantially taken from his April 2015 Ross Parsons Lecture at the University of Sydney Law School.

Toward A Political Theory For Private International Law, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

Private international law presents a dilemma for legal and political philosophy. Legal and political philosophers have ignored private international law, with only a few scattered attempts to evaluate its claims. Private international law offers a powerful set of counterexamples that put into serious doubt attempts to link law’s authority only or primarily to relationships between states and citizens. No society, state, or other practice-mediated relationship can serve as grounds for the authority of private international law to persons to whom it applies but who are outside of such relationships. Private international law affects the normative situations of persons entirely outside …

Holding Canada Accountable: An Evaluation Of Canada's Compliance To The United Nations Declaration On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples, Jackson A. Smith

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Compliance of human rights norms requires the application of pressure from a multitude of directions and levels. It takes individual advocacy, micro-system/organizational/community-level pressure, and macro-level pressure from other nation-states and international organizations and governance bodies. This MA study focuses on the mechanisms employed by the United Nations to monitor the compliance of signatory nation-states to the standards established in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), with particular focus on Canada. A crucial goal of this study is to translate the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNSRRIP), James Anaya’s, findings on the …

Follow The Money: Essays On International Taxation – Introduction, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

Publicity about tax avoidance techniques of multinational corporations and wealthy individuals has moved discussion of international income taxation from the backrooms of law and accounting firms to the front pages of news organizations around the world. In the words of a top Australian tax official, international tax law has now become a topic of barbeque conversations. Public anger has, in turn, brought previously arcane issues of international taxation onto the agenda of heads of government around the world.

Despite all the attention, however, issues of international income taxation are often not well understood. This Introduction outlines a collection of essays, …

Backlash Against International Courts In West, East And Southern Africa: Causes And Consequences, Karen J. Alter, James T. Gathii, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This paper discusses three credible attempts by African governments to restrict the jurisdiction of three similarly-situated sub-regional courts in response to politically controversial rulings. In West Africa, when the ECOWAS Court upheld allegations of torture by opposition journalists in the Gambia, that country’s political leaders sought to restrict the Court’s power to review human rights complaints. The other member states ultimately defeated the Gambia’s proposal. In East Africa, Kenya failed in its efforts to eliminate the EACJ and to remove some of its judges after a decision challenging an election to a sub-regional legislature. However, the member states agreed to …

Drawing Lines Among The Persecuted, Kate Evans

Faculty Scholarship

Should a victim of persecution be denied protection in the United States if his persecutors forced him to participate in their campaign of terror? In its 2009 decision, Negusie v. Holder, the Supreme Court recognized the “difficult line drawing problems” presented by this question, but failed to offer concrete guidance to the lower courts or the executive agencies charged with drawing those lines. Circuit courts employ a variety of standards, leaving the law in disarray.

This Article offers original historical research to argue that asylum seekers charged with participating in persecution should be afforded a duress defense. It traces the …

Obama's Aumf Legacy, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack Landman Goldsmith

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Presidential War Powers As A Two-Level Dynamic: International Law, Domestic Law, And Practice-Based Legal Change, Curtis A. Bradley, Jean Galbraith

Faculty Scholarship

There is a rich literature on the circumstances under which the United Nations Charter or specific Security Council resolutions authorize nations to use force abroad, and there is a rich literature on the circumstances under which the U.S. Constitution and statutory law allows the President to use force abroad. These are largely separate areas of scholarship, addressing what are generally perceived to be two distinct levels of legal doctrine. This Article, by contrast, considers these two levels of doctrine together as they relate to the United States. In doing so, it makes three main contributions. First, it demonstrates striking parallels …

The Dod Law Of War Manual And Its Critics: Some Observations, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) new Law of War Manual has generated serious debate about its treatment of a variety of issues including human shields, the status of journalists, cyber operations, the precautions to be taken prior to attacks and even the role of honor in war. Although this article does not purport to be a comprehensive response to every critique of the Manual and, indeed, cites opportunities for its improvement, it nevertheless concludes that on balance the Manual provides an excellent, comprehensive and much-needed statement of DoD’s view of the lex lata of the law of war.