The latest issue of the International Criminal Law Review (Vol. 17, no. 5, 2017) is out. Contents include:
Ethics & International Affairs, the quarterly peer-reviewed publication of the Carnegie Council, is pleased to invite submissions for upcoming issues.
The journal bridges the gap between theory and practice by featuring articles, essays, and book reviews that integrate rigorous thinking about principles of ethics and justice into discussions of practical issues related to current policy developments, global institutional arrangements, and the conduct of important international actors.
In 2018, the editors are particularly interested in articles for peer review that address the following broad topics:
Emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, advanced weapons, cyberspace, and climate geoengineering.
Issues of gender, women, and children, including feminist ethics, gender and development, women and children’s rights, and women and war.
Global health, including the right to health, health governance, health and climate change, and health equity.
We welcome both individual papers and proposals for special sections and symposia. We accept submissions on a rolling basis and strive to complete our rigorous peer review process within three months.
For our submission guidelines, please see here
Public International Law
Private International Law
The Guide on the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards provides a detailed analysis of the judicial interpretation and application of the New York Convention by reference to case law from 45 Contracting States. The Guide, and the newyorkconvention1958.org website which supplements it, will become an essential tool that benefits all those involved in the interpretation and application of the New York Convention, including judges, arbitrators, practitioners, academics and Government officials.
The Guide gives clear expression to the principal finding of extensive research, namely, that the Contracting States have interpreted and applied the New York Convention in an overwhelmingly consistent manner and that courts have diverged from the general trends in the case law in only isolated instances. As such, the Convention continues to fulfill its purpose of facilitating the worldwide recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards to the greatest extent possible.
International organizations have been with us for a long time. They are now cardinal actors in international life, law and politics, a critical role which was probably not fully anticipated at their inception in the mid-nineteenth century.
It is frequently acknowledged that, especially since the creation of the United Nations in 1945, the role of organizations has increased exponentially. Today over 600 international intergovernmental organizations are active in virtually all areas of human activity, including (but not at all limited to) environmental protection; peace and security; health; trade; food and agriculture; technology; human rights; rail transport; and space travel. Organizations are platforms for State action, but they also operate as independent actors. Indeed, next to States, organizations are key participants in international legal affairs. In the same vein, many of the resolutions, decisions, statements and drafts produced by international organizations have lasting relevance for the development and interpretation of international law and its main rules. In addition, international organizations and their institutional structure have themselves been elevated into an important object of study and numerous scholarly works on international organizations are produced every year. Issues of international norm-creation, decision-making, and immunity of organizations before domestic courts, to name but a few, continue to be topical and extensively studied.
While there is general agreement on the increasing role played by international organizations, the actual extent of this role and the implications thereof remain the object of intense debate in legal and scholarly commentaries. Indeed, organizations today seem to be simultaneously acclaimed and abhorred; deemed to be the guardian of the international order and the cause of international disorder; taken as the monitors of fundamental rights and the villains of the international rule of law. By the same token, there is a wide range of understandings of what constitutes an ‘international organization’, ranging from an inter-state treaty regime to an autonomous constitutional subject with its own legal order. In this sense, international organizations and their contribution to global governance have perhaps never been as discussed and contested as they are today.
It is in this context that Oxford International Organizations (OXIO) has been built, with the aim of providing practitioners, scholars, legal advisers, policy-makers, and observers of international relations with the most precise, holistic and up-to-date picture of the acts of international organizations possible, and with an increased understanding of the contribution of these organizations. OXIO is the first database for analyzing and understanding key documents of international organizations. Each document is accompanied by a concise expert commentary. In order to capture the full bearing of international organizations on various substantive areas of international law as well as on the field of international institutional law in particular, OXIO includes, but is not limited to, resolutions and decisions of organizations, draft normative texts prepared within the framework of organizations, and constituent instruments of organizations. It also contains court decisions relevant for the institutional law of organizations as well as, occasionally, a treaty to which an organization is a party, where this brings light to issues of institutional law. Until now, there have been no such collection of documents spanning all organizations and areas of international law. OXIO is a unique repository which brings together a variety of documents that have never been consolidated in one single tool – a tool that will be constantly updated with the latest documents and acts of international organizations.
For the sake of OXIO, ‘international organization’ refers to an intergovernmental organization established between states or other international legal actors by a treaty or other instrument possessing at least some permanence of structure. ‘Non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) are excluded from the scope of OXIO. Yet, OXIO is keen to take into account the fringes of the intergovernmental category so defined. Thus, a document of the G20 (an intergovernmental platform with probably an insufficient degree of permanence to qualify as a traditional ‘international organization’) could be relevant for an OXIO headnote. The same holds for a document pertaining to a ‘public-private partnership’ (where the private party-component would preclude it from qualifying as a traditional ‘international organization’).
The Editors are proud to introduce OXIO to the community of all those who are interested in international organizations, and commend Oxford University Press for facilitating the creation of such an innovative and unprecedented database which will allow practitioners, scholars, legal advisers, policy-makers and observers of international relations and global governance to have at their disposal the most extensive, consolidated and updated database on international organizations and their contribution to international life, law, and politics.
The Editors-in-Chief
In this bold and persuasive work Daniel Gervais, one of the world’s leading thinkers on the subject of intellectual property, argues that the international copyright system is in need of a root and branch rethink. As the Internet alters the world in which copyright operates beyond all recognition, a world increasingly defined by the might of online intermediaries and spawning a generation who are simultaneously authors, users and re-users of creative works, the structure of copyright in its current form is inadequate and unfit for purpose. This ambitious and far-reaching book sets out to diagnose in some detail the problems faced by copyright, before eloquently mapping out a path for comprehensive and structured reform. It contributes a reasoned and novel voice to a debate that is all too often driven by ignorance and partisan self-interest.
Today through Saturday, October 26-28, 2017, the American Society of International Law will hold its annual Midyear Meeting in St. Louis. The meeting will include a Practitioners' Forum and a Research Forum. The program is here (Practitioners' Forum/Research Forum).
Conventional accounts of The Federalist tend to overlook a critical and uncontroversial fact about the Constitution: the principal function it assigned the proposed new government was the conduct of the Union’s foreign affairs. By neglecting this simple point, readers too often are led to miss the forest for the trees. The Federalist’s central task was not to offer a general blueprint for republican government but, rather, to demonstrate the depth of the Confederation’s failures in foreign affairs and to explain why the new federal government would both govern more effectively in that realm and not imperil the republican commitments of the Revolution. This insight, in turn, reveals another: Even when The Federalist focuses on themes that seem far removed from the problem of foreign affairs — whether in analyzing the general principles of federalism or the separation of powers, the importance of energy in the executive or independence in the judiciary, or the deficiencies of popular assemblies — foreign affairs remains its ultimate subject. It was while developing a theory adequate to explain the interrelation between domestic and foreign governance that the authors of The Federalist were led to their deepest insights. Borrowing from Scottish Enlightenment ideas — which they filtered through their political experiences under the Confederation — they rooted their argument in theories of human nature and the social psychology of governance, which they then applied not only to diagnose the causes of the Confederation’s failings but also to explain the institutional arrangements that could overcome them. The result was an account of how the new federal government would be able to limit the influence of the destructive passions over the making of foreign policy and thereby take advantage of the bounded possibilities of peaceable, productive international relations.
Although the US has consistently relied on the ICJ’s doctrine of specially-affected states to claim that it and other powerful states in the Global North play a privileged role in the formation of customary international law, the doctrine itself has been almost completely ignored both by legal scholars and by the ICJ itself. This article attempts to fill that lacuna. In particular, by focusing on debates in a variety of areas of international law – with particular emphasis on the jus ad bellum and jus in bello – it addresses two questions: (1) what makes a state “specially affected”? and (2) what exactly is the importance of a state qualifying as “specially affected” for the formation of custom? The article concludes not only that the US approach to the doctrine of specially-affected states is fatally flawed, but also that a more theoretically coherent understanding of the doctrine would give states in the Global South power over custom formation that the US and other Global North states would never find acceptable.
The latest issue of Transnational Environmental Law (Vol. 6, no. 3, November 2017) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the Journal of International Criminal Justice (Vol. 15, no. 4, September 2017) is out. Contents include:
