International Law Commons^™

Enforcement Options And Paths To Compliance: Disputants And Global Stakeholders In Philippines V. China, Diane Desierto

Journal Articles

The Philippines v. China arbitration award has been praised as a landmark victory setting forth illuminating jurisprudence interpreting the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea [UNCLOS], but it has also been repeatedly excoriated as an "unenforceable" decision-a Pyrrhic victory-due to China's repeated refusal to date to acknowledge the binding effect of the award. China's withdrawal from Scarborough Shoal-hailed by the new Duterte government as a hallmark of its diplomatic efforts-is one instance of state practice that still remains equivocal on the opinio juris of China's acceptance (or rejection) of the arbitration award.

Shifting Sands In The International Economic System: "Arbitrage" In International Economic Law And International Human Rights, Diane Desierto

Journal Articles

International economic law is in the middle of rapid sea changes, arising from converging demands for deep reform on all fronts. These reforms range from current initiatives to recast the orthodox substantive guarantees of foreign market access, investment protection, prudential regulation and financial stability to states' choices between paths of unilateralism, bilateralism, regionalism, multilateralism, or some hybrid multi-speed variation between gradualism and compliance with economic commitments. They also include the formulation of different proposals to revise the dispute settlement mechanisms in world trade law, to rewrite the terms of investor-state dispute settlement, and to harden a definitive dispute settlement process …

The Popular But Unlawful Armed Reprisal, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

The United States and Iran carried out armed reprisals in Syria during 2017 in the wake of chemical and terror attacks. Despite support for their actions even by countries such as Germany and France, retaliatory uses of force are clearly prohibited under international law. International law generally prohibits all use of armed force with narrow exceptions for self-defense, United Nations Security Council authorization, and consent of a government to participate in a civil war. Military force after an incident are reprisals, which have been expressly forbidden by the UN. Prior to the Trump administration, the U.S. consistently attempted to justify …

The Internationalists: How A Radical Plan To Outlaw War Remade The World, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

Mary Ellen O'Connell researches and writes in the areas of international law and the use of force and international legal theory. She provides a thorough review of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), wherein the authors investigate the investigate the history, nature, and impact of the international legal prohibition on the use of force, focusing on the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Unintended Agency Problems: How International Bureaucracies Are Built And Empowered, Anu Bradford, Stavros Gadinis, Katerina Linos

Faculty Scholarship

The ground underneath the entire liberal international order is rapidly shifting. Institutions as diverse as the European Union, International Monetary Fund, United Nations, and World Trade Organization are under major threat. These institutions reflect decades of political investments in a world order where institutionalized cooperation was considered an essential cornerstone for peace and prosperity. Going beyond the politics of the day, this Article argues that the seeds of today’s discontent with the international order were in fact sown back when these institutions were first created. We show how states initially design international institutions with features that later haunt them in …

International Lobbying Law, Melissa (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

An idiosyncratic array of international rules allows nonstate actors to gain special access to international officials and lawmakers. Historically, many of these groups were public-interest associations like Amnesty International. For this reason, the access rules have been celebrated as a way to democratize international organizations, enhancing their legitimacy and that of the rules they produce. But a focus on the classic public-law virtues of democracy and legitimacy produces a theory at odds with the facts: The international rules rules also offer access to industry and trade associations like the World Coal Association, whose principal purpose is to lobby for their …

Are Advocates General Political? An Empirical Analysis Of The Voting Behavior Of The Advocates General At The European Court Of Justice, Jens Frankenreiter

Scholarship@WashULaw

The question whether political preferences of EU Member States play a role in the decision making of the members of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has so far gone largely unanswered in the literature. This paper formally tests the hypothesis that the political preferences of Member State governments are reflected in the decisions of the Advocates General, who are judge-like members of the ECJ. The empirical analysis is motivated by a novel model of the interaction between the Advocate General and the judicial panel. It uses a newly assembled dataset combining information on agreements and disagreements between the opinions …

Is Religion A Threat To Human Rights? Or Is It The Other Way Around? Defending Individual Autonomy In The Ecthr's Jurisprudence On Freedom Of Religion, Andrea Scoseria Katz, Paulo Pinto De Albuquerque

Scholarship@WashULaw

Religious freedom is part and parcel of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR)’s broad catalogue of human rights. Yet in reality, religion and human rights can have a fraught, conflictive relationship. Is religion a threat to human rights? Are human rights a threat to religion?

These questions resist easy answers, yet an examination of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) suggests that, on the whole, the Court has been more successful in identifying threats posed by religious beliefs or organizations to human rights than vice-versa. As to the former, we examine case-law in two subject …

'Fraternité' In Echr Jurisprudence, Andrea Scoseria Katz, Paulo Pinto De Albuquerque

Scholarship@WashULaw

Solidarity rights can increasingly be found in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the preeminent rights-protecting body in the world. This article examples three specific spheres in which the ideal of solidarity has left its mark on the Court’s jurisprudence: (1) society’s obligation to its most vulnerable members; (2) the right to collective enjoyment of public goods like the environment; and (3) the rights of particular groups to self-development. It examines the manner and extent that such rights have been instantiated and the theoretical difficulties they pose to a human rights court.

The Theory And Practice At The Intersection Between Human Rights And Humanitarian Law, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

The United States is more than fifteen years into a fight against terrorism that shows no sign of abating and, with the change in administration, appears to be intensifying. Other Western democracies that have historically been uneasy about U.S. counterterrorism policies have, in recent years, shifted toward those policies. And armed nonstate groups continue to commit large-scale acts of violence in multiple distinct theaters. The legal issues that these situations present are not entirely new, but neither are they going away. Recent publications, like the three works under review, thus provide useful opportunities to reflect on and refine our thinking …

The Jus Ad Bellum'S Regulatory Form, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that a form of legal regulation is embodied in decisions at the UN Security Council that condone but do not formally authorize specific military operations. Such decisions sometimes inflect or go beyond what the jus ad bellum permits through its general standards — that is, under the prohibition of cross-border force and small handful of exceptions. Recognizing that this form of regulation is both part of the law and different in kind from regulation through the general standards should change how we think about the jus ad bellum.

The Trafficking Victim Protection Act: The Best Hope For International Human Rights Litigation In The U.S. Courts?, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

The article focuses on uses Alien Tort Statute as a vehicle for litigating human rights abuses in both civil and criminal prosecutions in the U.S. Topics discussed include developments in International Criminal Law in addressing human rights violations; judicial attitudes that could affect the interpretation of the Trafficking Victim Protection Act; and Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain court case on the same.

The Price Of Law: The Case Of The Eurozone's Collective Action Clauses, Elena Carletti, Paolo Colla, Mitu Gulati, Steven Ongena

Faculty Scholarship

Do markets value contract protections? And does the quality of a legal system affect such valuations? To answer these questions we exploit a unique experiment whereby, after January 1, 2013, newly issued sovereign bonds of Eurozone countries under domestic law had to include Collective Action Clauses (CACs) specifying the minimum vote needed to modify payment terms. We find that CAC bonds trade at lower yields than otherwise similar no-CAC bonds; and that the quality of the legal system matters for this differential. Hence, markets appear to see CACs as providing protection against the legal risk embedded in domestic-law sovereign bonds.

When Terrorists Govern: Protecting Civilians In Conflicts With State-Building Armed Groups, Mara R. Revkin

Faculty Scholarship

Many existing U.S. counter-terrorism policies, including those governing targeting and detention, rely on an empirical assumption that terrorist groups are primarily military organizations. This assumption may be appropriate in the case of al-Qaeda, but it fails to describe terrorist groups that engage not only in warfare but also in governance and state-building such as the Islamic State, a self-declared “caliphate” that—at the height of its expansion in 2014—claimed sovereignty over an estimated 34,000 square miles and 10 million civilians. This Article identifies a category of “state-building” terrorist groups that can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) the presence of …

Treaty Exit And Intra-Branch Conflict At The Interface Of International And Domestic Law, Laurence R.. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter, forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Foreign Relations Law, considers two important and unresolved issues raised by unilateral withdrawal from or denunciation of treaties. The first issue concerns whether treaty obligations end in both international and domestic law after a state leaves a treaty. Exit often produces the same effects in both legal systems, but some withdrawals bifurcate a treaty’s status, ending its obligations in domestic law but continuing to bind the state internationally, or vice versa. The second issue concerns denunciations initiated by different branches of government. The decision to withdraw from a treaty is usually …

Why The Nagoya Protocol To The Cbd Matters To Science And Industry In Canada And The United States, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Afterword: What's Next? Into A Third Decade Of Latcrit Theory, Community, And Praxis, Steven W. Bender, Francisco Valdes, Jorge R. Roig, Jasmine Gonzalez Rose, Saru Matambanadzo, Roberto Corrada, Shelley Cavalieri, Tayyab Mahmud, Zsea Bowmani, Anthony E. Varona

Scholarly Works

In this multi-vocal Afterword, we reflect-personally and collectively to help chart renewed agendas toward and through a third decade of LatCrit theory, community, and praxis. This personal collective exercise illustrates and reconsiders the functions, guideposts, values, and postulates for our shared programmatic work a framework for our daily work as individuals and teams through our portfolio of projects, which in turn emerged as a "reflection and projection of LatCrit theory, community and praxis." These early anchors expressly encompassed (1) a call to recognize and accept the inevitable political nature of U.S. legal scholarship; (2) a concomitant call toward anti-subordination praxis …

Incentive Compatible Climate Change Mitigation: Moving Beyond The Pledge And Review Model, Gabriel Weil

Scholarly Works

Climate change represents a global commons problem, where individuals, businesses, and nation-states all lack sufficient incentives to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to levels consistent with meeting their collectively agreed upon mitigation goals. The current "pledge and review" paradigm for global climate change mitigation, which many see as a major breakthrough, relies primarily on moral pressure, reputational incentives, and global public opinion to foster cooperation on mitigation efforts over and above those driven by maximization of narrow conceptions of national interests. Given the scale of the emissions reductions required to meet stated mitigation goals, the substantial economic costs of deep …

"We Only Spy On Foreigners": The Myth Of A Universal Right To Privacy And The Practice Of Foreign Mass Surveillance, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The digital age brought with it a new epoch in global political life, one neatly coined by Professor Philip Howard as the “pax technica.” In this new world order, government and industry are “tightly bound” in technological and security arrangements that serve to push forward an information and cyber revolution of unparalleled magnitude. While the rise of information technologies tells a miraculous story of triumph over the physical constraints that once shackled mankind, these very technologies are also the cause of grave concern. Intelligence agencies have been recently involved in the exercise of global indiscriminate surveillance, which purports to go …

Law, Religion, And Immigration: Building Bridges With Express Lanes, Mark Goldfeder, Gideon Sapir

Scholarly Works

This Article asks whether it can ever be moral or legal to use certain criteria, including nationality and/or religion, in formulating preferential immigration policies. In order to answer the question, it presents an in-depth look at the controversial "right of return, " focusing in particular on the example of the Israeli Law of Return. It contains a detailed history of the law and its development; a defense of the right of return in general; the principle and contextual arguments in favor of an amendment to or abrogation of Israel’s law; and a theoretical and practical defense of the law, with …