Call for Abstracts: 2019 ASIL Midyear Meeting

The American Society of International Law has issued a call for abstracts for its 2019 Research Forum at Brooklyn Law School, a part of the Society's Midyear Meeting, which will be held November 7-9. The deadline is May 13, 2019. Here's the call:

The American Society of International Law calls for submissions of scholarly paper proposals for the 2019 ASIL Research Forum to be held at ASIL Academic Partner Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, NY.

The Research Forum, a Society initiative introduced in 2011, aims to provide a setting for the presentation and focused discussion of works-in-progress. All ASIL members are invited to attend the Forum, whether presenting a paper or not.

Papers may be on any topic related to international and transnational law and should be unpublished (for purposes of the call, publication to an electronic database such as SSRN is not considered publication). Interdisciplinary projects, empirical studies, and jointly authored papers are welcome.

Proposals should be submitted below by Monday, May 13, 2019. Interested presenters should submit an abstract (no more than 500 words in length) summarizing the scholarly paper to be presented at the Forum. Abstracts will be considered via a blind review process. Papers that do not follow these guidelines will not be considered. Notifications of acceptance will go out in early June.

Papers accepted for presentation will be assembled into panels. The organizers welcome volunteers to serve as discussants who will comment on the papers. All authors of accepted papers will be required to submit a draft paper four weeks before the Research Forum (Thursday, October 10). Accepted authors must commit to being present on both Friday, November 8 and Saturday, November 9, 2019. Draft papers will be posted in advance of the Forum on the Midyear Meeting App, accessible only by participants in the Meeting.

Potential presenters will have the option to request that their papers be considered for the Second Annual David D. Caron Prize. The Prize will be awarded for the best paper presented at the Research Forum by

1. a student currently enrolled in a graduate program; or
2. a person who received a graduate degree not more than five years prior to the date of the Research Forum at which the paper is presented.

In addition, student or early career authors of accepted abstracts will have the option to apply for a limited number of David D. Caron Fellowships, designed to provide financial assistance to individuals who would not otherwise be able to attend and present their scholarship. More information about these fellowships will be circulated to accepted authors.

Papers must actually be presented at the Research Forum to be eligible for the Prize and must be submitted one week earlier than the normal deadline, Thursday, October 3, in order to allow the Prize Committee time to read the papers that qualify for consideration. Papers not received by that date will not be considered for the Prize. Co-authored papers are eligible for consideration provided all the co-authors meet the requirements stated above. The Prize recipient will be announced at the Research Forum and will receive a travel stipend to attend the Society's 2020 Annual Meeting, where the Prize will be formally presented.

Allen: The Chagos Advisory Opinion and the Decolonization of Mauritius

Stephen Allen (Queen Mary, Univ. of London - Law) has posted an ASIL Insight on The Chagos Advisory Opinion and the Decolonization of Mauritius.

Horsthemke: Immunitäten für Staatsoberhäupter und hochrangige Regierungsmitglieder vor dem IStGH

Johanna Horsthemke has published Immunitäten für Staatsoberhäupter und hochrangige Regierungsmitglieder vor dem IStGH (Duncker & Humblot 2019). Here's the abstract:

Der IStGH verfolgt völkerrechtliche Verbrechen, die insbesondere durch Staatsoberhäupter verübt werden, welche durch völkerrechtlichen Immunitätsschutz grundsätzlich vor internationaler Strafverfolgung geschützt sind. Dieses Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Völkerstrafanspruch und völkerrechtlichem Immunitätsschutz ist aktueller Gegenstand zahlreicher politischer Auseinandersetzungen, die insbesondere afrikanische Staatsoberhäupter betreffen. Die vorliegende Arbeit löst das Spannungsverhältnis unter Begutachtung relevanter Vorschriften unter Berücksichtigung aktueller gerichtlicher Entscheidungen auf, indem sie im Schwerpunkt aufzeigt, dass sich bis heute im vertikalen Verhältnis sehr wohl eine völkergewohnheitsrechtliche Anerkennung einer Ausnahme von der persönlichen Immunität für amtierende Staatsoberhäupter (auch aus Nichtvertragsstaaten) vor dem IStGH etabliert hat und sich diese Ausnahme auch auf das horizontale, zwischenstaatliche Verhältnis ausweiten lässt.

Choudhury: International Investment Law and Non-Economic Issues

Barnali Choudhury (Univ. College London - Law) has posted International Investment Law and Non-Economic Issues. Here's the abstract:

Arbitral tribunals have misconstrued the purpose of international investment agreements (IIAs) by failing to factor in the development aspect of these agreements into their analysis. IIAs were constituted to protect foreign investment in order to promote economic development, meaning that there is a nexus between international investment and development. However, arbitral tribunals have focused primarily on the investor protection elements of IIAs, leading to impingements on human rights and the environment, leaving IIAs as a threat to sustainable development.

Drawing from all publicly available investment awards, a review of these awards found 56 awards in which human rights and environmental issues were implicated in investment disputes. The article then engaged in a textual analysis of these awards as well, finding that in many instances, arbitral tribunals downplay or dismiss non-economic issues leaving compromises to both human rights and environmental issues and constraints on state ability to regulate these areas.

Based on the findings of the review of the arbitral awards, the article makes suggestions for how best states can reform IIAs to help them better align with the development aspects of these agreements. Ultimately, the article concludes that although states can anticipate IIA impediments to their development goals by redrafting treaty language, it cannot anticipate every impediment. Therefore, only with a substantial change to the procedural elements of investment arbitration can the development aspects of IIAs finally be realized alongside the already well-established investor protection aspects.

New Issue: Indian Journal of International Law

The latest issue of the Indian Journal of International Law (Vol. 58, nos. 1-2, June 2018) is out. Contents include:

• Mariko Kawano, Judge Shigeru Oda: A judge with academic and diplomatic experiences
• Diego Mejía-Lemos, International law, international obligations and sovereignty in the work of judge Moreno Quintana
• Rajdeep Pakanati, Reading Professor V. S. Mani from an international relations perspective
• Aniruddha Rajput,Necessity of “objective awareness” for the “existence of dispute”
• Sanoj Rajan, Ending international surrogacy-induced statelessness: an international human rights law perspective
• Ahmad Ghouri, Served on a silver platter? A review of the UNCTAD Global Action Menu for Investment Facilitation
• Saren Abgaryan, EU-China comprehensive agreement on investment in the context of Chinese bilateral investment treaty program with the EU countries
• V. C. Govindaraj, J.H.C. Morris, the proper law doctrine and the law of obligations: A critical appraisal

New Issue: Revista Española de Derecho Internacional

The latest issue of the Revista Española de Derecho Internacional (Vol. 71, no. 1, 2019) is out. Contents include:

• Estudios
• Ricardo Gosalbo Bono, Consideraciones en torno a la distinción entre el fondo y la forma en el Derecho internacional (público y privado)
• Cástor Miguel Díaz Barrado, La Cumbre de las Américas: un espacio para la cooperación sin apenas proyección normativa
• Guillermo Palao Moreno, La determinación de la ley aplicable en los reglamentos en materia de régimen económico matrimonial y efectos patrimoniales de las uniones registradas 2016/1103 y 2016/1104
• Felipe Gómez Isa, La declaración de las Naciones Unidas sobre los Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas: un hito en el proceso de reconocimiento de los derechos indígenas
• Javier Morales Hernández, Las Relaciones Internacionales en Rusia: desarrollo, enfoques y debates
• Salomé Adroher Biosca, La protección de adultos en el Derecho internacional privado español: novedades y retos
• Stelios Stavridis, La diplomacia parlamentaria: el papel de los Parlamentos en el mundo
• Foro. "Land Grabbing" en el derecho internacional: problemas y perspectivas
• Michele Nino, El análisis del "land grabbing" a la luz de la norma internacional de la soberanía territorial
• Marco Fasciglione, La exigencia de responsabilidad a las empresas por las violaciones de derechos humanos relacionadas con el "land grabbing": evolución y perspectivas
• Foro. Perspectivas de la seguridad energética europea en el mediterráneo
• Andrea Prontera, EU external engagement and the Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation: Between Regional initiatives and Strategic Partnerships
• Antonio José Sánchez Ortega, El Mediterráneo oriental y la diversificación de gas a Europa

New Issue: Swiss Review of International and European Law

The latest issue of the Swiss Review of International and European Law (Vol. 28, no. 4, 2018) is out. Contents include:

• Gabriel Amvane, United Nations Peacekeeing and the Developing World
• Odile Ammann, International law in domestic courts through an empirical lens: The Swiss Federal Tribunal's practice of international law in figures

Bell: Empire, Race and Global Justice

Duncan Bell (Univ. of Cambridge - Politics and International Studies) has published Empire, Race and Global Justice (Cambridge Univ. Press 2019). Contents include:

• Duncan Bell, Introduction: Empire, Race and Global Justice
• Katrina Forrester, Reparations, History and the Origins of Global Justice
• Samuel Moyn, The Doctor’s Plot: The Origins of the Philosophy of Human Rights
• Sundhya Pahuja, Corporations, Universalism, and the Domestication of Race in International Law
• Charles W. Mills, Race and Global Justice
• Inés Valdez, Association, Reciprocity, and Emancipation: A Transnational Account of the Politics of Global Justice
• Anne Phillips, Global Justice: Just Another Modernisation Theory?
• Margaret Kohn, Globalizing Global Justice
• Jeanne Morefield, Challenging Liberal Belief: Edward Said and the Critical Practice of History
• Kimberley Hutchings, Cosmopolitan Just War and Coloniality
• Catherine Lu, Decolonizing Borders, Self-Determination, and Global Justice

Foster & Lambert: International Refugee Law and the Protection of Stateless Persons

Michelle Foster (Univ. of Melbourne - Law) & Hélène Lambert (Univ. of Technology Sydney - Law; Univ. of Westminster - Law) have published International Refugee Law and the Protection of Stateless Persons (Oxford Univ. Press 2019). here's the abstract:

International Refugee Law and the Protection of Stateless Persons examines the extent to which the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees protectsde jure stateless persons. While de jure stateless persons are clearly protected by the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, this book seeks to explore the extent to which such persons are also entitled to refugee status. The questions addressed include the following: When is a person 'without a nationality' for the purpose of the 1951 Refugee Convention? What constitutes one's country of former habitual residence as a proxy to one's country of nationality? When does being stateless give rise to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons specified in the 1951 Refugee Convention and/or UNHCR mandate? What are the circumstances under which statelessness constitutes persecution or inhuman or degrading treatment? How are courts assessing individual risk or threat to stateless persons?

The book draws on historical and contemporary interpretation of international law based on the travaux préparatoires to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its antecedents, academic writing, UNHCR policy and legal documents, UN Human Rights Council resolutions, UN Human Rights Committee general comments, UN Secretary General reports, and UN General Assembly resolutions. It is also based on original comparative analysis of existing jurisprudence worldwide relating to claims to refugee status based on or around statelessness. By examining statelessness through the prism of international refugee law, this book fills a critical gap in existing scholarship.

Bob: Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power

Clifford Bob (Duquesne Univ. - Political Science) has published Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power (Princeton Univ. Press 2019). Here's the abstract:

Rights are usually viewed as defensive concepts representing mankind’s highest aspirations to protect the vulnerable and uplift the downtrodden. But since the Enlightenment, political combatants have also used rights belligerently, to batter despised communities, demolish existing institutions, and smash opposing ideas. Delving into a range of historical and contemporary conflicts from all areas of the globe, Rights as Weapons focuses on the underexamined ways in which the powerful wield rights as aggressive weapons against the weak.

Clifford Bob looks at how political forces use rights as rallying cries: naturalizing novel claims as rights inherent in humanity, absolutizing them as trumps over rival interests or community concerns, universalizing them as transcultural and transhistorical, and depoliticizing them as concepts beyond debate. He shows how powerful proponents employ rights as camouflage to cover ulterior motives, as crowbars to break rival coalitions, as blockades to suppress subordinate groups, as spears to puncture discrete policies, and as dynamite to explode whole societies. And he demonstrates how the targets of rights campaigns repulse such assaults, using their own rights-like weapons: denying the abuses they are accused of, constructing rival rights to protect themselves, portraying themselves as victims rather than violators, and repudiating authoritative decisions against them. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of examples, including nineteenth-century voting rights movements; the American civil rights movement; nationalist, populist, and religious movements in today’s Europe; and internationalized conflicts related to Palestinian self-determination, animal rights, gay rights, and transgender rights.

Comparing key episodes in the deployment of rights, Rights as Weapons opens new perspectives on an idea that is central to legal and political conflicts.

Dingwerth, Witt, Lehmann, Reichel, & Weise: International Organizations under Pressure: Legitimating Global Governance in Challenging Times

Klaus Dingwerth (Univ. of St. Gallen - Political Science), Antonia Witt (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt), Ina Lehmann (Univ. of Bremen), Ellen Reichel (Ibn Rushd-Goethe Moschee Berlin), & Tobias Weise (German Univ. of Health and Sport) have published International Organizations under Pressure: Legitimating Global Governance in Challenging Times (Oxford Univ. Press 2019). Here's the abstract:

International organizations like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, or the European Union are a defining feature of contemporary world politics. In recent years, many of them have also become heavily politicized. In this book, we examine how the norms and values that underpin the evaluations of international organizations have changed over the past 50 years. Looking at five organizations in depth, we observe two major trends. Taken together, both trends make the legitimation of international organizations more challenging today. First, people-based legitimacy standards are on the rise: international organizations are increasingly asked to demonstrate not only what they do for their member states, but also for the people living in these states. Second, procedural legitimacy standards gain ground: international organizations are increasingly evaluated not only based on what they accomplish, but also based on how they arrive at decisions, manage themselves, or coordinate with other organizations in the field. In sum, the study thus documents how the list of expectations international organizations need to fulfil to count as 'legitimate' has expanded over time. The sources of this expansion are manifold. Among others, they include the politicization of expanded international authority and the rise of non-state actors as new audiences from which international organizations seek legitimacy.

New Volume: Hague Yearbook of International Law

The latest volume of the Hague Yearbook of International Law (Vol. 29, 2016) is out. Contents include:

• Brian Sang YK, International Humanitarian Law in the Jurisprudence of African Human Rights Treaty Bodies
• Ilias Kouskouvelis & Kalliopi Chainoglou, Against the Law: Turkey’s Annexation Efforts in Occupied Cyprus
• Rebecca Huertas, Putting the Nail in the Coffin: Isn’t it Time to Let the European Consensus Doctrine Put an End to the Use of the Death Penalty in the United States?
• Katharina Wende, The Application of Bilateral Investment Treaties in Annexed Territories: Whose BITs are Applicable in Crimea after its Annexation?
• Leonor Vulpe Albari, The Estrada Doctrine and the English Courts: Determining the Legitimate Government of a State in the Absence of Explicit Recognition of Governments

New Volume: Austrian Review of International and European Law

The latest volume of the Austrian Review of International and European Law (Vol. 21, 2016) is out. Contents include:

• Gábor Kajtár, The Caroline as the ‘Joker’ of the Law of Self-Defence – A Ghost Ship’s Message for the 21st Century
• Gerhard Hafner, The ‘Soviet’ Intervention in Czechoslovakia (1968)
• Karl Zemanek, Globalization versus Sovereignty: A Challenge to International Law
• Nasiya Daminova, The ‘Due Process’ Rights as a Part of the EU’s Acquis Communautaire: A Challenge for the EU (Potential) Candidate States?
• Sebastian Grund, The Greek Debt Crisis and Sovereign Debt Litigation in Austrian Courts

Mouralis: Le Moment Nuremberg : Le procès international, les lawyers et la question raciale

Guillaume Mouralis (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) has published Le Moment Nuremberg : Le procès international, les lawyers et la question raciale (Presses de Sciences Po 2019). Here's the abstract:

À partir d'une enquête sur les lawyers qui, outre Atlantique, ont jeté les bases du procès , impulsé et conduit les débats, Guillaume Mouralis en propose une relecture passionnante. Il révèle le faisceau de contraintes professionnelles, sociales, culturelles qui ont lourdement pesé sur ce moment expérimental et s'interroge sur son legs.

« La manière dont l'Allemagne traite ses habitants […] n'est pas plus notre affaire que ce n’est celle d’un autre gouvernement de s’interposer dans nos problèmes. » Les mots de Robert Jackson, procureur en chef américain au procès de Nuremberg, sont sans ambages : la répression des crimes racistes commis par les nazis ne saurait ouvrir la voie à un examen international de l’ordre racial qui prévaut alors aux États-Unis. L’atteste la définition particulièrement corsetée du crime contre l’humanité adoptée en 1945.

À partir d’une enquête sur les lawyers qui, outre-Atlantique, ont jeté les bases du procès, impulsé et conduit les débats, Guillaume Mouralis propose une relecture passionnante de Nuremberg. Il révèle le faisceau des contraintes professionnelles, sociales et culturelles qui ont lourdement pesé sur ce moment expérimental. Il s’interroge finalement sur son legs. Comment a-t-il été mobilisé dans les luttes afro-américaines pour les droits civiques, ou celles, ultérieures, contre la guerre du Vietnam ? Et comment ces appropriations militantes ont-elles marqué l’émergence d’un dispositif judiciaire international ?

Lauterpacht Centre Friday Lunchtime Lecture Series for Easter Term 2019

Here's the schedule for the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law's Easter Term 2019 Friday Lunchtime Lectures:

• April 26, 2019: Timothy Meyer (Vanderbilt Univ. - Law), Foreign Affairs and the National Security Economy
• May 3, 2019: Latha Varadarajan (San Diego State Univ. - Political Science), International Law on Trial
• May 10, 2019: Damilola Olawuyi (HBKU - Law), Sovereign Wealth Funds and International Law

Workshop: The Future of Multilateralism

On April 30, 2019, the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law will hold a workshop on "The Future of Multilateralism." The program is here.

Shaffer & Gao: A New Chinese Economic Law Order?

Gregory Shaffer (Univ. of California, Irvine - Law) & Henry S. Gao (Singapore Management Univ. - Law) have posted A New Chinese Economic Law Order? Here's the abstract:

China is incrementally developing a new, decentralized model of trade governance through a web of finance, trade, and investment initiatives involving memorandum of understandings, contracts, and trade and investment treaties. In this way, China could create a vast, Sino-centric, regional order in which the Chinese state plays a nodal role. This model mirrors China’s internal development strategy. But now Chinese state-owned and private enterprises are internationalized and integrated within Sino-centric global production chains. It is a hub and spokes model, with China at the hub. In this paper, we first examine China’s export of its infrastructure-based development model (Part A) before turning to its creation of a complementary web of free trade and investment agreements (Part B), and an indigenous innovation policy (Part C). The paper theorizes and empirically traces how this forms part of the broader evolving ecology of transnational trade legal orders.