Scholarship • Events • Ideas
The latest issue of the Michigan Journal of International Law (Vol. 45, no. 1, 2024) is out. Contents include:
This article challenges conventional views of international law textbooks as mere instructional tools and explores them as powerful sites for shaping knowledge and the discipline. Drawing on empirical methods and critical theory, we analyse the 10 main international law textbooks used in Brazil and conduct interviews with their authors to illuminate the textbooks’ complexities and their potential for shaping the discipline and the profession. The article delves into the tension between the structure of international law as depicted in the textbooks and the agency of their authors, investigating the authors’ identities and backgrounds. Brazil serves as a compelling case study due to its numerous international law textbooks and their widespread use. Our results indicate a predominant universalist approach in Brazilian textbooks and their connection to the French international law tradition. Moreover, the study sheds light on the Brazilian ‘invisible college’ of international lawyers, revealing gender and racial disparities and institutional centralities. It also uncovers crucial omissions in the textbooks, such as the relationship of international law to colonialism, slavery, race, gender and economic inequality. Overall, this study offers a comprehensive understanding of international law as a field in Brazil and provides a valuable methodological framework for future research on textbooks’ role in shaping the discipline.
On 30 March 2023, the International Court of Justice rendered its judgment on the merits of the case concerning Certain Iranian Assets, in which the Iranian central bank was not characterized as a company within the meaning of the Treaty of Amity. In so concluding, the Court relied upon the test focusing on the central bank’s sovereign functions and the purposes of the transaction at stake. Debate surrounds the origin and sources of inspiration of the sovereign function test, insofar as the majority’s minimum reasoning leaves an impression that it arose from thin air. This article explores the origin and the sources of inspiration of the test, concluding that the Court’s judgment affords the reading that the test was inspired, albeit clandestinely, by rules and practice specifically dedicated to the characterization of central bank activities, located in areas such as the laws of State immunity or responsibility, by judicial cross-referencing.
The concept of territory is central in international law, but a detailed analysis of how the concept is used in both discourse and practice has been lacking until now. Rather than reproducing the established understanding of territoriality within the international legal order, this study suggests that the discipline of international law relies on an outmoded spatial paradigm. Gail Lythgoe argues for a complete update and overhaul of our understanding of territory and space, to engage more effectively with key processes, structures and actors relevant to contemporary global governance. In this new theoretical account of an essential aspect of public international law, she argues that territory is a dynamic social reality created by the exercise of power. Territories are constituted by the practices of a more diverse array of actors than is acknowledged. As a result, functions are re-assembling in territories constituted by state and non-state actors alike.
