International Law Commons^™

Editorial: Special Focus On 'Dignity Takings And Dignity Restorations', Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

What's Your Advice, Counsel? From Distinction To Detention, Financial Support To Ground Support, And Everything In Between, Journal Staff

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

An informal summary of the discussions that took place in the Workshop Session of the 2nd IDF International Conference on the Law of Armed Conflict, held April 25-27, 2017. In this session, conference participants were given practical scenarios on a range of issues for consideration. In adherence with the Chatham House Rule, the summary is presented without reference to the identity or affiliation of the participants.

Understanding Serious Bodily Or Mental Harm As An Act Of Genocide, Nema Milaninia

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

What is genocide? The typical answer immediately brings to mind incidents of large-scale killings like those in World War II, Rwanda, and Srebrenica. The same images, however, create an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of the crime. Genocide is a far broader concept than mass executions. The crime was deliberately designed to capture the variant and innumerable ways individuals or organizations might try to destroy racial, ethnic, religious, or national groups. And while certain acts, like rape and other acts of sexual violence, never formed part of the crime's initial understanding, these acts are now accepted as tools of destruction …

Trapped: Cycles Of Violence And Discrimination Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender Persons In Guyana, Ashley Binetti Armstrong

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Human rights fact-finding aims to uncover and describe human rights concerns to expose both the abuses themselves and the factors that enable their perpetuation. Giving voice to survivors and victims is central to the fact-finding methodology: After all, “. . . if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country . . . [o]ne goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most – and listens to their testimony.”

Through Georgetown Law’s Fact-Finding Practicum, the Human Rights Institute works with a small group of students on a cutting-edge human rights …

The Story Of The Dubai International Financial Centre Courts: A Retrospective, Jayanth K. Krishnan

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Can Western-based, English-speaking, common law commercial courts operate successfully in an environment that are not their own—such as in the Middle East? This question is not a simple thought experiment but rather the reality that has occurred since the mid-2000s in the Emirate of Dubai. This monograph recounts the history of how the ‘Dubai International Financial Centre Courts’ emerged. Drawing on extensive interviews with key stakeholders involved in the process, along with rich original documents as well as all of the Courts’ judgments, this narrative offers important lessons for those seeking to understand more fully the complex interplay of how …

Politics, Power Dynamics, And The Limits Of Existing Self-Regulation And Oversight In Icc Preliminary Examinations, Asaf Lubin

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Professor Lubin's contribution to volume 2 is titled, "Politics, Power Dynamics, and the Limits of Existing Self-Regulation and Oversight in ICC Preliminary Examinations," pp. 77-150.

Should the normative framework that governs the International Criminal Court’s (‘ICC’) oversight concerning preliminary examinations undergo a reform? The following chapter answers this question in the affirmative, making the claim that both self-regulation by the Office of the Prosecutor (‘OTP’) and quality control by the Pre-Trial Chamber (‘PTC’) currently suffer from significant deficiencies, thus failing to reach the optimum point on the scale between absolute prosecutorial discretion and absolute control. The chapter demonstrates some of …

Cyber Law And Espionage Law As Communicating Vessels, Asaf Lubin

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Professor Lubin's contribution is "Cyber Law and Espionage Law as Communicating Vessels," pp. 203-225.

Existing legal literature would have us assume that espionage operations and “below-the-threshold” cyber operations are doctrinally distinct. Whereas one is subject to the scant, amorphous, and under-developed legal framework of espionage law, the other is subject to an emerging, ever-evolving body of legal rules, known cumulatively as cyber law. This dichotomy, however, is erroneous and misleading. In practice, espionage and cyber law function as communicating vessels, and so are better conceived as two elements of a complex system, Information Warfare (IW). This paper therefore first draws …

Faith-Based Mediation In The Pakistan-India Conflict, Sarah Khan

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Section II of this Note explores the background history of Muslims and Hindus in India, the partition, and some of the most prominent issues that stand in the way of resolution. Section III discusses how religious mediation methods have been, and continue to be, used successfully in the contexts of other countries and conflicts. Section IV proposes that these methods be applied in the Pakistan-India situation to target specific issues facing the two countries, while incorporating the already proposed solutions that are on the table by politicians today.

Mediation Capacity Building With Liberian Diaspora Communities: Some Observations, Maria R. Volpe, Bradley L. Roth

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The focus of this article will be on elucidating an initiative that has involved multiple partnerships, sensitivity to cultural differences, local-global interactions, work with diaspora communities, adaptation of mediation training programs, dedicated volunteerism, and concerns about sustainability. Central to all of the activities is an explicit resolve by the mediators involved to understand and appropriately respond to the parties' contexts when providing mediation expertise. John Paul Lederach has referred to this method as a mix of prescriptive and elicitive approaches. In sum, the trainers used their expertise as both mediators and trainers to be conscious of and sensitive to the …

Lessons From The South China Sea Ruling: Med-Arb As The Recommended Dispute Resolution Method For Asia's Maritime Disputes Under Unclos, Julia Y. Yang

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

-This Note discusses the weaknesses of the current default dispute resolution method implemented by UNCLOS. Part II of this Note illustrates the recent history and the nature of the South China Sea dispute and the legal context provided by UNCLOS for maritime disputes in Asia. Part III will discuss the inadequacy of the current default adjudication method implemented by UNCLOS. Part IV recommends the adoption of med-arb as the ideal dispute resolution method and a requirement to show consent before parties engage in proceedings for maritime dispute resolutions in Asia.

Building Victim-Led Coalitions In The Pursuit Of Accountability, Diane Orentlicher

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Assurances ofvictim participation in proceedings before the International Criminal Court and Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia have been seen as a welcome corrective to the flawed model of earlier tribunals. The first such tribunal created since the postwar period, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was established by the UN Security Council in May 1993 without even consulting those who survived the atrocities that gave rise to its creation, the majority of which took place in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Nor were victims formally incorporated into the ICTY's work except for those who provided testimony and other evidence. …

Inaccessible Apexes: Comparing Access To Regional Human Rights Courts And Commissions In Europe, The Americas, And Africa Symposium: Comparing Regional Human Rights Regimes, Claudia Martin, Francoise Hampson, Frans Vilijoen

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The three well-established regional human rights systems (in Europe, the Americas, and Africa) aim to provide access to individuals to a decision and remedy based on the violation of human rights in the founding treaties. In this article, the notion of the "dispute pyramid," developed in sociolegal studies, generally, is adjusted to describe and help us better understand regional access. Access differs considerably across the three systems, and its major stumbling blocks present themselves at different stages. In the European system, most cases are dismissed at the admissibility phase. In the Inter-American system, most cases are weeded out at the …

The Legal Regime Of Protection Of The Right To Freedom Of Expression In The Inter-American System, Claudio Grossman

Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.

The Peace Vs. Justice Debate And The Syrian Crisis, Paul Williams, Lisa Dicker, C. Danae Paterson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Peace negotiators often face the difficult decision of whether to pursue peace at the potential cost of achieving justice, or to pursue justice at the potential cost of achieving near term peace. There are abiding ethical and moral debates surrounding this tension between peace and justice. In Syria—where the death toll has exceeded 470,000, 11 million have been displaced, and there are over 14,000 documented cases of torture to the point of death—the peace versus justice debate is a living dilemma with which negotiators are currently grappling. This article strives to examine a timely facet of this multidimensional puzzle: how …

Table Of Contents, Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review, Vol. 1, Iss. 2

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Biased Damages Awards: Gender And Race Discrimination In Tort Trials, Goran Dominioni

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

Current U.S. tort law incentivizes potential tortfeasors to target members of underprivileged social groups by using gender and race-based statistical tables life expectancy; work-life expectancy and average wage) to award damages. Legal scholars have long criticized this practice from the point of view of distributive justice but supported it on welfarist grounds. Recent research in law and economics has however cast doubts on the efficiency of this practice. On this basis, some propose abandoning it in favor of gender and race neutral tables. In this article, I contribute to this debate by analyzing from a behavioral law and economics perspective …

Constructing A "Creative Reading": Will Us State Cannabis Legislation Threaten The Fate Of The International Drug Control Treaties?, Michael Tackeff

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

While marijuana remains illegal at the federal level in the United States, state-level efforts to legalize cannabis have gained enormous momentum in recent years. The federal government, which possesses only limited power to stop this trend, has responded by grudgingly allowing such efforts to proceed, maintaining that its inaction on the issue comports with the international drug control regime. This presents a particularly complex problem for international policymakers and legal scholars, who worry that this state-federal conflict may render international drug treaties meaningless. This Note argues that the federal government's strategy is a productive lens through which to view an …

"Development" Versus" Sustainable Development"?: (Re-) Constructing The International Bank For Sustainable Development, Johanna A.P. Lorenzo

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article scrutinizes the potential contribution of the World Bank, as an international economic organization, to the sustainable development agenda. Analyzing the reforms in policies, procedures, and organizational structure that accompanied the Bank's involvement in ostensibly political,non-economic matters such as human rights, environmental protection, and good governance--all of which are critical components of sustainable development--this Article contends that, contrary to the so-called mission creep argument, the evolution of the Bank's mandate is legally defensible and normatively desirable. Instead of amending its constituent instrument, the Bank has optimized the teleological-evolutionary approach to treaty interpretation to expand and reconstruct its mandate in …

Special Issue: The Law Of Armed Conflict, Ben Wahlhaus, Hannah Lidicker

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Few areas of international law are as consequential as the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). At its very core, it entails an endeavor to regulate death and destruction both for those who participate in a conflict and for those who are simply affected by the conflict.

LOAC is also of continued relevance. The number of armed conflicts around the world does not seem to be on the wane, and thus there is no shortage of situations in which LOAC remains applicable.

Just as the law retains its consequence and relevance, the study of LOAC retains its importance. Old questions warrant …

Introduction To Keynote Address: A Tribute To Yoram Dinstein, Colonel Dr. Eran Shamir-Borer

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

If one puts in “Control F” and “Search “Dinstein” in the IDF International Law Department’s database of legal opinions, the word will appear almost as often as the word “law.” And when we hear that word “Dinstein” we think firstly not of the person, but of the fundamental texts which guide many of us in our work.

As Such, Professor Yoram Dinstein has joined that small group of people for whom the mention of their names has connotations of a concept or a school more than the person themselves.