On 24-25 September 2015, the Law School at Lancaster University will be hosting a conference on the possibilities of developing “A Jurisprudence of Complexity”. The keynote speaker will be JB Ruhl (Vanderbilt Law School, USA), who has written widely on the subject of complexity theory and law. Other participants will include Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Oxford); Lucy Finchett-Maddock (Sussex); Neville Harris (Manchester); and Paul Cairney (Stirling) as well as Jamie Murray, Tom Webb, and Steven Wheatley (all Lancaster) The conference will also hear from experts in complexity theory in other disciplines including Sylvia Walby (Sociology) and, Robert Geyer (Politics).
Whilst there is no paradigmatic ‘theory of complexity’, there are a number of insights from complexity that can be applied to Law and which might influence the way in which legal theory addresses the central questions of jurisprudence. These insights relate to issues of the unpredictability of legal system functioning; the idea of the law system as an emergent phenomenon, which is the result of the quality of the interactions between law actors; the ability of law systems to adapt to changes in world society, and the functioning of other law systems; The importance of context to understanding the law system (without adopting a Darwinist reading of the evolution of the Law System); The fact that lawyers cannot avoid ethical responsibility for the way the law system functions; and the unclear, contested, and open nature of system boundaries, and the manner in which they interface with society.
Drawing on the insights in the literature on the theory and practice of complex adaptive systems, this conference will bring together leading system theory thinkers from law and a number of other disciplines to address the foundational questions of a Complexity Jurisprudence:
(1) How does complexity theory understand “Law”?
(2) How do complexity theorists understand the functioning of Law and how does this influence the idea of Law as a regulatory tool?
(3) What is the ‘value-added’ of an approach from complexity to the study of how law operates (in particular when contrasted with other postmodern and systems approaches).
(4) What does complexity tell us about the academic function of critique and the functioning of sub-discipline discourses (public law, environmental law, international law, etc.)?
Lancaster University now seeks expressions of interests from speakers and discussants in any areas related to the subject of the conference. We welcome applications from postgraduate researchers and scholars at all stages of their career.
The conference will take place at Lancaster University on 24 -25 September 2015. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to Dr Tom Webb (t.webb@lancaster.ac.uk), by 6pm 15 June 2015, and must include the author’s name, affiliation, and full contact information. Decisions regarding inclusion in the workshop program will be sent by 1 July, 2015.
Attendance at the conference is free for speakers. The School regrets that is unable to offer assistance with travel, accommodation or other costs.
Saturday, May 9, 2015
Call for Papers: A Jurisprudence of Complexity? Rethinking the Relationship between Law and Society
Kalpouzos & Mann: Banal Crimes Against Humanity: The Case of Asylum Seekers in Greece
In recent years, Greece has inflicted widespread inhuman and degrading treatment on asylum seekers. The European Union border agency Frontex has knowingly exposed asylum seekers to such treatment in Greek detention centres. This article argues that acts of Greek and Frontex agents may lead to individual responsibility for crimes against humanity under Article 7 1. (e), (h) and (k) of the Rome Statute. Investigation of such acts remains unlikely, not due to the relevant doctrine, but due to a popular imagination of crimes against humanity as radically evil acts. But International Criminal Law should not only aim to punish radically evil acts. Equally important is seemingly banal violence that appears as an inevitable by-product of global social and economic structures. Such is the violence currently wielded against asylum seekers. Confronting the latter category requires the ICC Prosecutor to realize the political nature of her judgement.
Friday, May 8, 2015
Call for Applications: Strategic Litigation (Doctoral Grants)
Wojnowska-Radzińska: The Right of an Alien to be Protected against Arbitrary Expulsion in International Law
In The Right of an Alien to be Protected against Arbitrary Expulsion in International Law Julia Wojnowska-Radzińska offers a comprehensive legal study of international legal obligations of States for the protection of aliens lawfully residing against arbitrary expulsion. It also provides practical information on administrative proceedings, legal remedies and procedural rights aliens exercise. The book aims at answering a fundamental question how to strike a balance between the inherent right of a State to expel an alien and the rights the latter is entitled to. The reader will therefore be given a survey of the subject that is both usefully brief and sufficiently detailed to answer most questions likely to arise in any pertinent legal setting.
Ronen: A Century of the Law of Occupation
The law of occupation, which was first codified around the turn of the twentieth century, has not often been applied in the century that followed. States have always been reluctant to constrain themselves by its rules, and political, social and economic changes that have taken place through the years have gradually made such constraints difficult even with the best of intentions. As a result, the law of occupation developed largely through doctrine and little through practice. The present article examines how these factors have affected the law of occupation from within and without. From within, it traces the development of the definition of occupation and the legitimate scope of intervention by an occupant in the administration of the territory. From without, it addresses the relationship between the law of occupation and other bodies of law, principally the right to self determination and international human right law; and their impact on the development of criteria for determining the legality of occupation.
New Issue: Legal Issues of Economic Integration
The latest issue of Legal Issues of Economic Integration (Vol. 42, no. 2, 2015) is out. Contents include:- From the Board, Preferentials and Plurilaterals: Between a Rock and a Hard Place for the WTO
- Szilárd Gáspár-Szilágyi, The ‘Horizontal Direct Effect’ of EU International Agreements: Is the Court Avoiding a Clear Answer?
- Marc Veenbrink, The Privilege against Self-Incrimination in EU Competition Law: A Deafening Silence?
- Joshua Waleson, Corporate Social Responsibility in EU Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements: Towards Sustainable Trade and Investment
- Merijn Chamon, Clarifying the Divide between Delegated and Implementing Acts?
New Issue: Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Institutions
The latest issue of Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Institutions (Vol. 21, no. 2, April-June 2015) is out. Contents include:- The Global Forum
- Craig N. Murphy, The Last Two Centuries of Global Governance
- Dan Plesch & Thomas G. Weiss, 1945’s Lesson: “Good Enough” Global Governance Ain’t Good Enough
- Articles
- Kathryn Hochstetler & Manjana Milkoreit, Responsibilities in Transition: Emerging powers in the Climate Change Negotiations
- Michael D. Beevers, Governing Natural Resources for Peace: Lessons from Liberia and Sierra Leone
- David Ciplet, Rethinking Cooperation: Inequality and Consent in International Climate Change Politics
- Brooke Coe, Sovereignty Regimes and the Norm of Noninterference in the Global South: Regional and Temporal Variation
- Sarah B.K. von Billerbeck, Local Ownership and UN Peacebuilding: Discourse Versus Operationalization
- Laura Reidel, Beyond State-centric Perspective on Norm Change: A Multilevel Governance Analysis of the Retreat from Multiculturalism
Thursday, May 7, 2015
New Issue: International Organization
- Articles
- Jacob N. Shapiro & Nils B. Weidmann, Is the Phone Mightier Than the Sword? Cellphones and Insurgent Violence in Iraq
- Stephen Chaudoin, Helen V. Milner & Xun Pang, International Systems and Domestic Politics: Linking Complex Interactions with Empirical Models in International Relations
- Max Abrahms & Philip B.K. Potter, Explaining Terrorism: Leadership Deficits and Militant Group Tactics
- Abel Escribà-Folch & Joseph Wright, Human Rights Prosecutions and Autocratic Survival
- Michael M. Bechtel & Thomas Sattler, What Is Litigation in the World Trade Organization Worth?
- Wade M. Cole, Mind the Gap: State Capacity and the Implementation of Human Rights Treaties
- Martin C. Steinwand, Compete or Coordinate? Aid Fragmentation and Lead Donorship
- Research Notes
- Alex Weisiger & Keren Yarhi-Milo, Revisiting Reputation: How Past Actions Matter in International Politics
- Sharanbir Grewal & Erik Voeten, Are New Democracies Better Human Rights Compliers?
Schill: The Overlooked Role of Arbitration in International Adjudication Theory
Liste: Geographical knowledge at work: Human rights litigation and transnational territoriality
In April 2013, the US Supreme Court left a mark on the spatiality of law. In a decision on human rights violations in Nigeria, state territoriality served as a technique to rule out the application of transnational law against private corporations. Paradoxically, the private actor turned out to be the primary beneficiary of this jurisdictional territorialism. Drawing on work in critical geography, the article argues that this was only possible against the background of a certain geographical knowledge as reproduced in the course of legal practice. The corporate production of space consisted of a ‘private use of territoriality’ to resist the extraterritorial application of law and thus transnational state regulation. During a spatial analysis of a number of the 82 amicus curiae briefs to Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, the article reveals how the geographical configurations of our contemporary order not only withstand transnational challenges, but are even reproduced transnationally by a multiplicity of state and non-state actors. While international law builds upon and reproduces territoriality as a foundational principle of global normativity, it also provides the means for the doing away with territoriality. In order to demonstrate how legal practice contributes to a critical reproduction of normativity on different scales (national and international, local and global), the article establishes a spatial gaze on transnational relations at work.
New Additions to the UN Audiovisual Library of International Law
Lim & Mercurio: International Economic Law after the Global Crisis
- C. L. Lim & Bryan Mercurio, The fragmented disciplines of international economic law after the global financial and economic crisis: an introduction
- Rolf H. Weber, Does financial law suffer from a systemic failure? A study of the fragmentation of legal sources
- Elisabetta Cervone, Credit rating agencies: financial multipolarity, EU regulatory export and the development of global standards through multilevel governance
- Emilios Avgouleas & Douglas W. Arner, The broken glass of European integration: origins and remedies of the Eurozone crisis and implications for global markets
- Ross P. Buckley, From regional fragmentation to coherence: a way forward for East Asia
- C.L. Lim, 'The law works itself pure': the fragmented disciplines of global trade and monetary cooperation, and the Chinese currency problem
- An Hertogen, Roadblocks and pathways towards inter-state cooperation in increasing interdependence
- Junji Nakagawa, The industrial policy of China and WTO law: 'the shrinking policy space' argument as sterile fragmentation
- Tomer Broude & Holger Hestermeyer, The first condition of progress? Freedom of speech and the limits of international trade law
- Shin-yi Peng, Emergency safeguard measures for trade in services: a case study of intra-disciplinary fragmentation
- Martins Paparinskis, The schizophrenia of countermeasures in international economic law: the case of the ASEAN comprehensive investment agreement
- Anita K. Krug, Multilateral convergence of investment company regulation
- Julien Chaisse, Greek debt restructuring, Abaclat v. Argentina and investment treaty commitments: the impact of international investment agreements on the Greek default
- Juan Ignacio Stampalija, Chinese bilateral investment treaties: a case of 'internal fragmentation'
- Antoine Martin, A post-global economic crisis issue: development, agriculture, 'land grabs', and foreign direct investment
- Tania Voon, Andrew Mitchell & James Munro, Intellectual property rights in international investment agreements: striving for coherence in national and international law
- Bryan Mercurio, The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement: less harmonization, further fragmentation
- Lorand Bartels, The WTO legality of the application of the EU's emission trading system to aviation
- Rafael Leal-Arcas & Andrew Filis, Certain legal aspects of the multilateral trade system and the promotion of renewable energy
- C. L. Lim & Bryan Mercurio, Conclusion: beyond fragmentation?
Conference: Colloque de la SFDI 2015
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Ruggie & Nelson: Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises: Normative Innovations and Implementation Challenges
This paper analyzes the first and still one of the very few international mechanisms established by governments to enable individuals, communities or their representatives to bring complaints against multinational corporations: the National Contact Point system under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. The paper identifies patterns of complaints over time; it examines what differences exist in these patterns since the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as the authoritative global standard in this space, key elements of which were incorporated into the OECD Guidelines; and it offers critiques of and suggestions for how the NCP system should be strengthened.
Martin: The Oxford Handbook of the Political Economy of International Trade
The Oxford Handbook of the Politics of International Trade surveys the literature on the politics of international trade and highlights the most exciting recent scholarly developments. The Handbook is focused on work by political scientists that draws extensively on work in economics, but is distinctive in its applications and attention to political features; that is, it takes politics seriously. The Handbook's framework is organized in part along the traditional lines of domestic society-domestic institutions - international interaction, but elaborates this basic framework to showcase the most important new developments in our understanding of the political economy of trade. Within the field of international political economy, international trade has long been and continues to be one of the most vibrant areas of study. Drawing on models of economic interests and integrating them with political models of institutions and society, political scientists have made great strides in understanding the sources of trade policy preferences and outcomes. The 27 chapters in the Handbook include contributions from prominent scholars around the globe, and from multiple theoretical and methodological traditions. The Handbook considers the development of concepts and policies about international trade; the influence of individuals, firms, and societies; the role of domestic and international institutions; and the interaction of trade and other issues, such as monetary policy, environmental challenges, and human rights. Showcasing both established theories and findings and cutting-edge new research, the Handbook is a valuable reference for scholars of political economy.
Sornarajah: Resistance and Change in the International Law on Foreign Investment
Since the 1990s, conflicts within international law on foreign investment have arisen as a result of several competing interests. The neoliberal philosophy ensured inflexible investment protection given by a network of investment treaties interpreted in an expansive manner, which led to states creating regulatory space over foreign investment. However, NGOs committed to single causes such as human rights and the environment protested against inflexible investment protection. The rise to prominence of arguments against the fragmentation of international law also affected the development of investment law as an autonomous regime. These factors have resulted in some states renouncing the system of arbitration and other states creating new treaties which undermine inflexible investment protection. The treaty-based system of investment protection has therefore become tenuous, and change has become inevitable. Emphasising the changes resulting from resistance to a system based on neoliberal foundations, this study looks at recent developments in the area.
Conference: International Law as a Mechanism for Justice
Conference: A Nordic Approach to International Law?
The Nordic countries have a long-standing tradition of collaboration on a wide range of legal issues. The Nordic Council of Ministers endeavours ‘to promote basic common principles in Nordic legislation’, and extensive inter-Nordic harmonization is now in place in areas as diverse as education, energy, taxation, culture, and gender equality.
But do these ‘shared Nordic values’ extend to embrace a common perspective on international law and policy beyond the Nordic region? And do international legal scholars in the Nordic countries share a professional outlook enabling us to speak of a distinct ‘Nordic approach to international law’?
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
New Issue: European Journal of International Relations
The latest issue of the European Journal of International Relations (Vol. 21, no. 2, June 2015) is out. Contents include:- Kai Jonas Koddenbrock, Strategies of critique in International Relations: From Foucault and Latour towards Marx
- Markus Kornprobst, Building agreements upon agreements: The European Union and grand strategy
- Phillip M. Ayoub, Contested norms in new-adopter states: International determinants of LGBT rights legislation
- Volha Charnysh, Paulette Lloyd, & Beth A. Simmons, Frames and consensus formation in international relations: The case of trafficking in persons
- Szymon M. Stojek & Jaroslav Tir, The supply side of United Nations peacekeeping operations: Trade ties and United Nations-led deployments to civil war states
- Stephanie C. Hofmann & Andrew I. Yeo, Business as usual: The role of norms in alliance management
- Jessica Schmidt, Intuitively neoliberal? Towards a critical understanding of resilience governance
- Einar Wigen, Two-level language games: International relations as inter-lingual relations
- A. Burcu Bayram, What drives modern Diogenes? Individual values and cosmopolitan allegiance
Workshop: Whither The West? Debates on Concepts of International Law in Europe and North America
The purpose of this two-day workshop is to explore and assess our understandings of international law in current debates among international legal scholars in the West, with the aim of understanding and building on its theoretical foundations.
Grigorescu: Democratic Intergovernmental Organizations?
This work posits that, over the past two centuries, democratic norms have spread from domestic politics to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Grigorescu explores how norms shaped IGO decision-making rules such as those driving state participation, voting, access to information, and the role of NGOs and transnational parliaments. The study emphasizes the role of 'normative pressures' (the interaction between norm strength and the degree to which the status quo strays from norm prescriptions). Using primary and secondary sources to assess the plausibility of its arguments across two centuries and two dozen IGOs, the study focuses on developments in the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization, the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization.
McInerney: Strategic Treaty Management: Practice and Implications
While little recognized in international law scholarship, multilateral treaties in diverse fields have begun to apply strategic management techniques to make them more effective and responsive. This examination of those practices and their interplay with associated international organizations considers the application of strategic management across treaties' planning, financing, implementation, and evaluation activities. The study leads to a new appreciation of the intricacies of multilateral treaty activities and a better understanding of their operations within complex webs of networked international institutions. In considering different approaches to steering treaties through this dispersed global governance landscape, Thomas F. McInerney draws on current strategic management literature to explore the utility of nonlinear, emergent models of strategy and gain insights from strategy as practice research. While recognizing strategic management's potential value in facilitating more flexible applications of multilateral agreements, he also emphasizes the need to maintain their normativity as international legal obligations.
Call for Papers: The Future of Transatlantic Economic Governance in the Age of the BRICS
CALL FOR PAPERS: DEADLINE 30 JUNE 2015
The International Economic Law Interest Groups
of the
American and European Societies of International Law
together with the
Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law
are pleased to announce a joint
2015 Scholarship Workshop on:
The Future of Transatlantic Economic Governance
in the Age of the BRICS
11-12 December 2015
to be held at the Max Planck Institute
Heidelberg, Germany
Workshop theme: As the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations have revealed, in some ways the developed economies of North America and Europe have never been more interested in creating a cooperative system of economic governance. In other ways, however, the relationship between these countries has never faced more challenges, as new economies disinclined to accept the trade rules and regulatory cooperation efforts of the developed world have ascended to new economic rights and have asserted new legal authority. Moreover, some of the traditional strengths of incumbency, such as a powerful currency and traditionally strong representation in international organizations, have come to look more like liabilities. This emerging economic order has presented challenges for Transatlantic cooperation efforts in trade law, investment law, financial regulation, monetary policy, and law and development – to say nothing of the longstanding conundrums raised by differences in competition law, complexities inherent in the supervision of multinational corporations and financial institutions, and problems posed by the need for sustained regulatory cooperation.
The International Economic Law Interest Groups of the American Society of International Law and the European Society of International Law, in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, will hold a joint workshop in which progress in research on these issues may be made. The working language of the workshop will be English.
Call for papers: We encourage IEL scholars, practitioners, and advanced doctoral students to submit proposals for paper presentations on any topic related to the workshop’s theme, broadly conceived. Proposals should be no more than one single-spaced page in length and should include the paper’s working title and an abstract describing its main thesis, methods, and contribution. Authors should also submit a separate, one-page bio or short curriculum vitae (CV) (max two pages) along with the abstract. Proposals should be emailed to: ASIL.ESIL.IntEcLIG.Workshop@gmail.com and must be received no later than June 30, 2015.
Selection process: Submissions will be reviewed by a joint selection committee convened by the organizers. Selection decisions will take into account the proposals’ originality, diversity, and relevance to the workshop’s theme and will aim to achieve a well-rounded representation of European, North American, and non-transatlantic perspectives. We plan to inform the selected participants by August 15, 2015, with papers due for circulation to all workshop participants no later than November 15, 2015.
Workshop Format: In order to ensure a high level of discussion, the workshop will take place over 1.5 days in a roundtable format. Presenters will be thematically grouped into four to five panels of three papers each, with a senior commentator moderating the discussion for each panel. Due to space limitations, early submission of proposals is highly encouraged.
Publication Possibility: Depending upon the topics of the final submissions, a number of workshop participants may be invited to submit their papers for publication within a special issue of the Journal of World Investment and Trade. Any such invitations will be extended in accordance with that Journal’s usual peer review and editorial policy.
Workshop Costs: We are in the process of applying for funding to help offset the costs of the workshop. Subject to final availability of funds, we hope to be able to cover reasonable economy class travel and accommodation costs to assist most participants with the journey to Heidelberg, which is particularly lovely during the holiday season. Final confirmation of funding availability will be communicated along with selection decisions.
Any further questions may be directed to the organizers at: ASIL.ESIL.IntEcLIG.Workshop@gmail.com.
We look forward to receiving your proposals!
On behalf of the ASIL IEcLIG:
Julie Maupin (Max Planck Institute, HD)
Sonia Rolland (Northeastern University)
Jarrod Wong (Pacific McGeorge)
David Zaring (Wharton)
On behalf of the ESIL IEcLIG:
Elisa Baroncini (University of Bologna)
Marion Pannizon (World Trade Institute)
Peter-Tobias Stoll (Georg August Universität, Göttingen)
On behalf of the Max Planck Institute:
Anne Peters (Co-Director)
Monday, May 4, 2015
Kamperman Sanders: The Principle of National Treatment in International Economic Law
- Thomas Cottier & Lena Schneller, The philosophy of non-discrimination in international trade regulation
- Lothar Ehring, National treatment under the GATT 1994: Jurisprudential developments on de facto discrimination
- James Flett, National treatment under the General Agreement on Trade in Services
- Arthur E. Appleton, National treatment under the TBT Agreement
- Denise Prévost, National treatment in the SPS Agreement: A sui generis obligation
- David Collins, National treatment in emerging market investment treaties
- Leïla Choukroune, National treatment in international investment law and arbitration: A relative standard for autonomous public regulation and sovereign development
- Christopher Heath, National treatment under the Paris Convention
- Robert Brauneis, National treatment in copyright and related rights: How much work does it do?
- Anselm Kamperman Sanders, National treatment under the TRIPS Agreement
- Sierd J. Schaafsma, The hidden conflict-of-law rule in the Berne and Paris principle of national treatment
Call for Papers: Rights, Identities and the Public Space
This stream aims to examine functions of public space as a terrain of rivalry between conflicting rights and identities. It assumes that the concept of ‘public space’ plays an important role for the realization of individual and collective rights, as well as expressing individual and collective identities. In a democracy, access to the public forum has always been a condition for the effective participation and realization of citizens’ rights. Nowadays, it is crucial not only for the participation in a democratic process, but also for the mere recognition of presence. Thus, the concept of ‘public space’ may be used either to enable or exclude, and questions who can access public space, or more precisely, who can participate in its making, and on what terms, are critical for any political authority.
The concept of ‘public space’ has already gained significant interest of legal and political theorists (Arendt, Habermas, Lefebvre). Yet, it remains ambiguous as a judicial category. Not only are its boundaries blurred and fluid, but also the meaning and function vary across jurisdictions and levels of authority. Furthermore, the boundaries, content and function of public space seems to change with the rights at stake. While only few rights are naturally confined to forum internum, which is free from any regulation, most of them require public space for their realization. Some rights flourish only when exercised in public, either because of their discursive nature or because of the conventional practice.
The steam invites contributions analysing both theoretical and practical aspects related to conflicts of claims of access to public space, taking into account the dynamic interaction between various sources of authority, in which individual and collective identities are often challenged, re-defined; constrained and constraining. Of particular interest to this stream is the problem of marginalization and exclusion of certain identities and the imposition of syntaxes of the prevailing majorities, which makes the identity-based discrimination hard to demonstrate. Papers in this stream could also analyse public space as a forum for rights discourse between different legal regimes of rights protection.
Please send abstracts (max. 250 words) to: a.simon@prawo.uni.wroc.pl
Bungenberg & Hobe: Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources
- Stephan Hobe, Evolution of the Principle on Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources
- Nico J. Schrijver, Fifty Years Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources
- Friedl Weiss & Bernhard Scherzer, (Existence of) Common or Universal Principles for Resource Management (?)
- Fernando Loureiro Bastos, A Southern African Approach to the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources and Common Resource Management Systems
- Richard W. Roeder, Australia’s Resource Management System in the Light of UNGA Resolution 1803
- Manjiao Chi, From Ownership-Orientation to Governance-Orientation
- Marc Bungenberg, Evolution of Investment Law Protection as Part of a General System of National Resources Sovereignty (and Management)?
- Shotaro Hamamoto, Compensation Standards and Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources
- André Thomashausen, (Foreign) Investment Strategies in Africa
- Karl M. Meessen, Kimberley as a Means of Promoting Good Governance: The Role of Business
- Hans-Georg Dederer, Extraterritorial Possibilities of Enforcement in Cases of Human Rights Violations
New Issue: International Security
- Michael Beckley, The Myth of Entangling Alliances: Reassessing the Security Risks of U.S. Defense Pacts
- Charles L. Glaser, A U.S.-China Grand Bargain? The Hard Choice between Military Competition and Accommodation
- Gene Gerzhoy, Alliance Coercion and Nuclear Restraint: How the United States Thwarted West Germany's Nuclear Ambitions
- Galen Jackson, The Showdown That Wasn't: U.S.-Israeli Relations and American Domestic Politics, 1973–75
- Arman Grigoryan, Concessions or Coercion? How Governments Respond to Restive Ethnic Minorities
- Correspondence
- Jack S. Levy & Jack Snyder, Everyone's Favored Year for War—or Not?
Call for Submissions: Paris COP
The Paris climate change conference (COP-21) to be held at the end of this year has the potential to deliver the most important advance in the international community's efforts to get the problem of global warming under control since the Climate Change Convention itself came into force twenty-one years ago. From a legal point of view, COP-21 has the capacity to develop and strengthen climate law at both the international and domestic levels. In the lead-up to the conference, the journal Climate Law will publish a number of articles dealing with the legal issues under discussion at the conference, as well as a special issue early in 2016 on the conference outcomes. The journal is now welcoming article submissions by law scholars on COP-related themes. Manuscripts may be submitted online. For all inquiries, please contact the Editor.
Cohen: International Precedent and the Practice of International Law
Why do international lawyers cite and argue from precedents? States, jealously guarding their authority to interpret international law, have usually denied the international courts they have created the power of precedent, at best remaining coy whether international courts should follow even their own prior decisions. And yet, arguments from precedent are everywhere; the decisions of international courts, tribunals, and expert bodies are regularly invoked as authority in arguments over what international law requires. International precedent is like the embarrassing family member who no one talks about but whose presence is impossible to ignore. Uninvited, it keeps coming anyway.
This chapter, part of an edited volume on state and non-state law, suggests a different model of international law that can better explain the ubiquity of precedent in international law arguments. Shifting away from a state-centric model of international law focused on the formal instruments and formal institutions that states create, this chapter instead focuses on what Robert Cover has described as the “jurisgenerative process” through which “communities do create law and do give meaning to law through their narratives and precepts.” It develops a model of international law as the product of a series of overlapping “communities of practice,” in which a varied group of international actors continually interact, negotiate, and argue over the law’s meaning. It is in this practice, this chapter argues, that precedents are proffered, and it is in these communities that those precedents’ relative worth are hashed out.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Voetelink: Status of Forces: Criminal Jurisdiction over Military Personnel Abroad
This book brings into focus the legal status of armed forced on foreign territory within, inter alia, the context of multi-national exercises and a variety of so-called crisis management operations. When it comes to criminal offences committed by military personnel while abroad it is important to know whether such offences fall under the criminal jurisdiction of the Sending State or that of the Host State. The book analyses this question from two different perspectives, namely traditional public international law and military operational law.
Taking his readership through two hundred years of international practice the author arrives at the current practice of laying down the status of forces deployed abroad in so-called Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs). Having looked at SOFAs from the two different law perspectives the author proposes the development of a “Status of Forces Compendium” to serve as a kind of guideline for future SOFAs. The author’s intention in proposing this idea is to instigate further discussion on the subject in public international law and criminal law circles and among armed forces’ legal advisors.
