The latest issue of the International Journal of Refugee Law (Vol. 34, no. 1, March 2022) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the Journal of International Peacekeeping (Vol. 25, no. 2, 2022) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (Vol. 16, no. 2, July 2022) is out. Contents include:
Throughout history, dissenting opinions have been subject to soaring praise as well as vitriolic criticism. Although some commentators nominally acknowledge that the normative value of dissenting opinions necessarily varies depending on the unique context in which the relevant court operates, in fact we see the same arguments advanced to support or oppose dissenting opinions, regardless of the court in which those opinions appear. Dissents are particularly prevalent in international criminal courts—those courts established to prosecute the worst crimes known to humankind: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Although dissents in these courts have garnered little scholarly attention, the few normative arguments that have been made track those that have been advanced for decades in the United States and other judicial systems. In a previous work, I launched a comprehensive empirical and normative analysis of separate opinions in international criminal law. Whereas my earlier scholarship laid the groundwork and evaluated certain alleged benefits of separate opinions, this article begins by empirically assessing their costs. The article then evaluates the primary normative claim made in support of separate opinions both domestically and internationally: that they enhance the legitimacy of the court and its opinions. These examinations reveal that previous commentators have employed one-size-fits-all analyses that fail to take account of the unique features of international criminal courts and mass atrocity trials. These features complicate the relationship between separate opinions and legitimacy, but the quantitative and qualitative evidence combined strongly suggest that separate opinions are likely to delegitimize an already fragile, vulnerable criminal justice system.
Controversial cases such as the Karadžić trial and the Bemba acquittal have highlighted the importance of fairness in international criminal trials. Through an in-depth critical analysis of procedural decisions at the ICTY and ICC between 2008 and 2018, Sophie Rigney shows that there is a clear separation between fairness and rights in practice.
Rigney demonstrates the various ways that fairness is invoked in international criminal law decisions – ways that are not always consistent, and are frequently at odds with defendants’ rights. She builds a new theoretical framework for understanding the concept and application of fairness and rights in international trials. In this way, she offers new paths for solving the problems currently plaguing those researching, designing, practising, adjudicating and being judged by international criminal law.
The latest issue of the European Journal of International Law (Vol. 33, no. 1, February 2022) is out. Contents include:
Global climate diplomacy—from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement—is not working. Despite decades of sustained negotiations by world leaders, the climate crisis continues to worsen. The solution is within our grasp—but we will not achieve it through top-down global treaties or grand bargains among nations.
Charles Sabel and David Victor explain why the profound transformations needed for deep cuts in emissions must arise locally, with government and business working together to experiment with new technologies, quickly learn the best solutions, and spread that information globally. Sabel and Victor show how some of the most iconic successes in environmental policy were products of this experimentalist approach to problem solving, such as the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer, the rise of electric vehicles, and Europe’s success in controlling water pollution. They argue that the Paris Agreement is at best an umbrella under which local experimentation can push the technological frontier and help societies around the world learn how to deploy the technologies and policies needed to tackle this daunting global problem.
A visionary book that fundamentally reorients our thinking about the climate crisis, Fixing the Climate is a road map to institutional design that can finally lead to self-sustaining reductions in emissions that years of global diplomacy have failed to deliver.
The latest issue of the Journal of International Criminal Justice (Vol. 20, no. 2, May 2022) is out. Contents include:
Global Legitimacy Crises addresses the consequences of legitimacy in global governance, in particular asking: when and how do legitimacy crises affect international organizations and their capacity to rule. The book starts with a new conceptualization of legitimacy crisis that looks at public challenges from a variety of actors. Based on this conceptualization, it applies a mixed-methods approach to identify and examine legitimacy crises, starting with a quantitative analysis of mass media data on challenges of a sample of 32 IOs. It shows that some, but not all organizations have experienced legitimacy crises, spread over several decades from 1985 to 2020. Following this, the book presents a qualitative study to further examine legitimacy crises of two selected case studies: the WTO and the UNFCCC. Whereas earlier research assumed that legitimacy crises have negative consequences, the book introduces a theoretical framework that privileges the activation inherent in a legitimacy crisis. It holds that this activation may not only harm an IO, but could also strengthen it, in terms of its material, institutional, and decision-making capacity. The following statistical analysis shows that whether a crisis has predominantly negative or positive effects depends on a variety of factors. These include the specific audience whose challenges define a certain crisis, and several institutional properties of the targeted organization. The ensuing in-depth analysis of the WTO and the UNFCCC further reveals how legitimacy crises and both positive and negative consequences are interlinked, and that effects of crises are sometimes even visible beyond the organizational borders.
This book argues that lawyers must often rely on contestable ethical and strategic intuitions when dealing with legal and factual uncertainties in 'hard cases' of resort to force. This area of international law relies on multiple tests which can be interpreted in different ways, do not yield binary 'yes/no' answers, and together define 'paradigms' of lawful and unlawful force. Controversial cases of force differ from these paradigms, requiring lawyers to assess complex, incomplete factual evidence, and to forecast the immediate and long-term consequences of using and not using force. Legal rules cannot resolve such uncertainties; instead, techniques from legal risk management, strategic intelligence assessment and political forecasting may help. This study develops these arguments using the philosophy of knowledge, socio-legal, politico-strategic and ethical theory, structured interviews and a survey with 31 UK-based international lawyers, and systematic analysis of key International Court of Justice cases and scholarly assessments of US-led interventions.
The latest issue of the Journal of World Intellectual Property (Vol. 25, no. 2, July 2022) is out. Contents include:
The legitimacy of global governance institutions is both contested and defended in contemporary global politics. Legitimation and Delegitimation in Global Governance explores processes of legitimation and delegitimation of such institutions. How, why, and with what impact on audiences, are global governance institutions legitimated and delegitimated? The book develops a comprehensive theoretical framework for studying processes of (de)legitimation in governance beyond the state. It provides broad comparative analyses to uncover previously unexplored patterns of (de)legitimation processes. A diverse set of global and regional governmental and nongovernmental institutions in different policy fields are included. Variation across these institutions is explained with reference to institutional set-up, policy field characteristics, and broader social structures, as well as to the qualities of agents of (de)legitimation. The approach builds on a mixed-methods research design that uses quantitative and qualitative new empirical data. Three main interlinked elements of processes of legitimation and delegitimation are at the center of the analysis: the varied practices employed by different agents that may boost or challenge the legitimacy of institutions; the normative justifications that these agents draw on when engaging in legitimation and delegitimation practices; and the different audiences that may be impacted by legitimation and delegitimation. This results in a dynamic interplay between legitimation and delegitimation in contestation over the legitimacy of GGIs.
