For all the attention paid to the panelists and Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Secretariat plays an overlooked and increasingly important role in the dispute settlement mechanism (DSM), including in selecting panelists, writing “issue papers” for adjudicators, providing economic expert advice, participating in internal deliberations, and drafting actual rulings. This Article

Having recently emerged from its unenviable status as the runt of international law, the phenomenon of statelessness nonetheless eludes traditional international legal instruments. Confronted with questions of nationality that typically fall within the domain of sovereignty, international and regional human rights bodies struggle to rein in the increasingly creative measures that states adopt to obscure

This Article analyzes long-standing disagreements over dissent's effect on judicial legitimacy, independence, and legal doctrine by undertaking the first comparative study of dissent practices across three leading tribunals, the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the European Court of Justice. Surprisingly, we find that each of the central claims in debates over

pluralism ignores conflicts of laws as a discipline, which is a problem, in his view, as the former lacks the precision of the latter.48 Whether or not the reader is persuaded by Michaels’s arguments, his chapter makes the underlying challenge faced by global legal pluralism of herding cats of many stripes into one cohesive and inclusive conversation. Despite (or perhaps because of) the abundant challenges

jects are likely to prevent such transformation; they operate as brinkmanship to safeguard that whatever happens with the global ecosystem will not lead to the loss of control over resources by those in governing positions. No doubt, technological innovations are positive. No doubt, soft norms and accountability proceedings will alleviate the most immediate problems, perhaps even for a long time. In

specialized, or extraterritorial issues in areas such as maritime law, but they are unlikely to be so receptive when it comes to more run-ofthe-mill issues, especially when the international law at issue is customary rather than treaty-based. As a result, international law’s success in expanding to increasing corners of lawmay have contributed to the reluctance of U.S. courts to link international

This Article theorizes “security” as a site of continuing struggle in the international system between competing approaches to identifying and responding to urgent threats. Rather than endorsing a single approach, this Article argues that a claim to “security” can imply any one of four approaches to law and policy, each of which has radically divergent implications for who is empowered by a security

The International Law Commission (ILC) held its seventy-second session from April 26 to June 4 and from July 5 to August 6, 2021 in Geneva, under the chairmanship of Mahmoud Hmoud (Jordan). This session was originally scheduled for the summer of 2020, but had to be postponed due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic continued in 2021 to present health risks and travel difficulties

On March 5, 2020, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) decided to authorize the prosecutor to commence a proprio motu investigation into the alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Afghanistan War since 2003. This decision is the first case where the requirements for the authorization of an investigation under Article 15(4) of the ICC Rome Statute

On June 17, 2021, the United States Supreme Court reversed and remanded a suit filed against Nestlé USA and Cargill under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) for lack of jurisdiction. This case has already garnered attention over the nature of the dispute (child slaves in Africa), the Supreme Court's treatment of jurisdiction under the ATS, and the finding shared by five of the nine Supreme Court justices

On October 6, 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its judgment in Commission v. Hungary. It found that Hungary had violated the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), as well as internal European Union law—specifically the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU Charter). The case arose out of Hungary's 2017 amendment to its higher education law. The amendment imposed

On February 6, 2020, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Court) declared in Lhaka Honhat Association v. Argentina that Argentina violated Indigenous groups’ rights to communal property, a healthy environment, cultural identity, food, and water. For the first time in a contentious case, the Court analyzed these rights autonomously based on Article 26 of the American Convention on Human Rights

On May 23, 2021, Belarusian authorities forced a Ryanair flight from Athens, Greece to Vilnius, Lithuania to land in Minsk in response to a false bomb threat and then arrested Roman Protasevich, an exiled journalist onboard the flight. The United States joined much of the international community in condemning the flight's diversion and imposing additional sanctions on Belarusian President Alexander

On April 1, 2021, the Biden administration issued an executive order reversing the Trump administration's sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) personnel. The administration rescinded the sanctions placed upon the ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and the head of the Office of the Prosecutor's Jurisdiction, Complementarity, and Cooperation Division, Phakiso Mochochoko, and removed the officials

In Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe, et al., former child slaves who were trafficked into Côte d'Ivoire to work on cocoa farms filed suit under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) against U.S.-based companies that purchase cocoa from and provide other support to the farms, alleging that the companies aided and abetted child slavery. By an 8–1 vote, the Supreme Court held that the case involved an impermissible extraterritorial

Nearly twenty years after the U.S. military began operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, President Joseph R. Biden reported on August 31, 2021, that the last U.S. combat troops had departed the country. Biden announced on April 14, 2021, that the United States would withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan before the twenty-year anniversary of September 11, 2001, and NATO member states decided

The COVID-19 pandemic generated wide interest in global health law (GHL). The ease of its spread, and its eruption at a time of massive global travel in a city that is a major transport hub, turned it into an unprecedented event in the post-World War II era.

The constitutional rules that govern how states engage with international law have profound implications for foreign affairs, yet we lack comprehensive data on the choices countries make and their motivations. We draw on an original dataset that covers 108 countries over a nearly two-hundred-year period to map countries’ foreign relations law choices and trace their evolution. We find that legal origins

International lawyers have played a central role in shaping contemporary understandings of and responses to civil war, including through debates over whether external actors can intervene in civil wars, what rules govern the resort to force, how neutral actors might continue trading with warring parties, and when investors and property owners are owed compensation for any losses suffered during the

Criminal law has long provided a site for understanding how a state governs or, as Max Weber would say, “organizes domination.”1 Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice offers a unique contribution to understanding how criminal law enables governance across states. Edited by Gregory Shaffer, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, and Ely

TLOs in a single collection, Transnational Legal Orders of Criminal Justice offers an opportunity to make visible these shared temporal, substantive, and geopolitical coordinates, recognizing how they draw on, reinforce, or contradict each other. The breadth, depth, and empirically grounded rigor of this book offers a nuanced and illuminating understanding of how criminal law governs or organizes domination

How do actors undertake institutional design in complex systems? Scholars recognize that many international regimes are becoming increasingly complex. Yet relatively little is known about how actors design or redesign institutions amid this complexity. As participant-observers in the UN negotiations on investment treaty reform, we have watched state officials and other participants grapple with this

Persons with disabilities have historically been subjected to egregious human rights violations. Yet despite well-documented and widespread harms, one billion persons with disabilities remain largely neglected by the international laws, legal processes, and institutions that seek to redress those violations, including crimes against humanity (CAH). This Article argues for the propriety of prosecuting

The strained U.S.-China trade relationship poses a frontal challenge to the multilateral trading system and has broad repercussions for international law. This Article addresses three dimensions of this relationship: (1) the economic dimension; (2) the geopolitical/national security dimension; and (3) the normative/social policy dimension. The Article advances a middle ground between those seeking

On May 21, 2020, a Tribunal established under Annex VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) rendered an Award regarding the 2012 Enrica Lexie incident, which involved the death of two Indian fishermen at the hands of Italian Marines. The Award is lengthy and wide-ranging, finding that: (1) Italy and India had concurrent jurisdiction over the incident; (2) the Tribunal had

On January 28, 2021, a Special Chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) dismissed all of the respondent's preliminary objections in Dispute Concerning Delimitation of the Maritime Boundary Between Mauritius and Maldives in the Indian Ocean (Mauritius/Maldives). The proceeding arose out of Mauritius's long-running effort to regain sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago,

The Biden administration has undertaken to reset U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, making early moves to break with the Trump administration's policy toward the country on several key fronts. White House officials have shifted the locus of diplomatic contact between the two countries from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration, to his

In Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that a country's taking of property from its own nationals does not fall within the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) exception for “rights in property taken in violation of international law.” The case involved a claim that Nazi officials coerced a consortium of three art firms owned by Jewish residents of Germany

On February 1, 2021, the military in Burma overthrew the democratically elected government, declared a one-year state of emergency, and installed Senior General Min Aung Hlaing as the head of government. Since the coup, the military has cracked down on protestors, killing over 800 people and detaining many more. Numerous countries and international organizations, including the United States and the

On February 25, 2021, the United States conducted a strike targeting Iranian-backed militia group facilities in Syria. The strike, which came in response to a February 15, 2021 attack on U.S. interests in Iraq, marked the Biden administration's first known exercise of executive war powers. As domestic authority for the strike, President Joseph Biden, Jr. cited his authority under Article II of the

Based on a comprehensive empirical analysis of maritime disputes during the twentieth century, this Article argues that international courts cast a shadow that markedly changes bargaining by potential litigating states. In particular, the filing of optional declarations under Article 287 of UNCLOS increases states’ use of non-binding methods of dispute settlement, and the Article theorizes that this

Privatization of functions that were traditionally considered sovereign has reached new heights. International lawyers have responded mostly by seeking to limit some of the consequences of that phenomenon, by, for example, ensuring accountability of states for outsourcing. International law has sometimes appeared agnostic, however, about the very legality of privatization. This Article explores a more

Advisory jurisdiction is a ubiquitous feature of international human rights adjudication. Yet the attention of legal scholars is almost entirely devoted to contentious jurisdiction. This Article aims to fill that gap in the literature. By introducing two models of advisory jurisdiction, and analyzing the example of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights—the world's most active international advice-giver—the

Economic sanctions, unilateral and multilateral, have a long pedigree in international relations. From South Africa and Israel, to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, such measures have, with varying results, been used in diverse contexts to influence the behavior of states. Some would celebrate the use of economic sanctions as a means of punishing “rogue states” for human rights violations or threats to

The judgment in Houngue Éric Noudehouenou v. Republic of Benin adds to the growing body of human rights jurisprudence on national electoral processes in Africa's international courts. Houngue Noudehouenou's (Houngue) case was sparked by a series of amendments to the 1990 Constitution of the Republic of Benin (Benin), Law No. 2019-40 (Revised Constitution), and changes to Benin's electoral law (para

On January 21, 2021, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or Court) issued its judgment in the interstate case of Georgia v. Russia (II). Georgia complained that Russia committed systemic human rights violations in the course of the 2008 war in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Both of these regions are de jure parts of Georgia, but they have not been effectively governed by central Georgian authorities

The judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or Court) in Makuchyan and Minasyan v. Azerbaijan and Hungary is remarkable both on account of its facts and the peculiar legal issues it raised. In 2004, an ax-wielding Azerbaijani army officer (R.S.) beheaded one Armenian officer, and attempted to kill another, while attending a NATO-organized English language course in Budapest, Hungary.

In two nearly identical judgments dated July 14, 2020, the International Court of Justice (ICJ or Court) reviewed a decision taken by the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in a dispute about aviation restrictions imposed on Qatar by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These cases represent the second time that the Court has heard an appeal

After Russia targeted the 2016 presidential election, U.S. government authorities repeatedly warned about the prospects of foreign interference in and influence on the 2020 election. Throughout the fall of 2020, government officials and private companies took a number of actions to address threats to the election, including issuing public warnings, imposing sanctions, and taking down foreign government-linked

On December 10, 2020, President Donald J. Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy by announcing that the United States would recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara as part of a deal in which Morocco would normalize relations with Israel. Despite a 1991 UN truce and continued calls by the UN Security Council for Morocco and the Polisario Front to reach a mutually agreeable solution, neither

The newly inaugurated administration of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. took immediate steps to reengage with a variety of international institutions and agreements from which the Trump administration had withdrawn. On January 20, 2021, the administration deposited with the United Nations a new instrument of acceptance of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and it halted U.S. withdrawal from the

In the final months of his administration, President Donald Trump issued a variety of pardons and commutations, including a number related to foreign relations. His decision to issue full pardons to four former Blackwater contractors, who were convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in the 2007 Nisour Square incident, drew particular condemnation and continued a pattern of clemency grants related to war

In October 2020, the United States arrested former Mexican Defense Secretary General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda on drug conspiracy charges, accusing him of accepting bribes to aid a Mexican cartel in evading law enforcement and transporting drugs into the United States. Cienfuegos's arrest sparked diplomatic protests from Mexico, which negotiated to gain Cienfuegos's release before exonerating him

After taking office, the Biden administration quickly moved to reverse or revoke a number of the Trump administration's immigration-related policies. On inauguration day, President Joseph Biden announced several significant changes, including termination of the national emergency at the southern border, halting border wall construction, and removal of discriminatory travel restrictions imposed primarily

After taking office, the Biden administration quickly moved to reverse or revoke a number of the Trump administration's immigration-related policies. On inauguration day, President Joseph Biden announced several significant changes, including termination of the national emergency at the southern border, halting border wall construction, and removal of discriminatory travel restrictions imposed primarily

tion, one needs not only to be able to read and figure out the extent to which one can accommodate the interest of other states but one needs also to be able to read the personalities of the other participants and understand what levers and methods will be effective in influencing them. In any event, it is clear that if one wants to gather sufficient votes for plenary adoption of legal texts, it is