This interdisciplinary socio-legal book explores the effects of climate change on Indigenous Peoples and minority groups. Jeremy Julian Sarkin argues that an integrated approach to deal with climate change, that also incorporates dealing with environmental justice matters, is needed. This is because dealing with environmental injustices must be prioritized in order to achieve the necessary climate change action goals and facilitate climate adaptation for the most vulnerable.
The book investigates the challenges encountered by Indigenous People and minority groups, who face extensive discrimination and often live in deprived areas that are not adequately equipped to deal with the consequences of climate change. By examining the issues concerning climate change and environmental justice in the United States, South Africa and Canada, Sarkin presents various ways to enhance the resilience of those most vulnerable to climate change. By integrating knowledge and methods from a range of disciplines, including the social and natural sciences, Sarkin argues that addressing these issues concurrently and in a unified manner would better aid Indigenous People and minority groups facing these effects.
The latest issue of the Journal of the History of International Law / Revue d'histoire du droit international (Vol. 27, no. 4, 2025) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the Review of International Organizations (Vol. 20, no. 4, December 2025) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law (Vol. 40, no. 4, 2025) is out. Contents include:
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) and scholars in international law have long operatedwithin the framework of the principle of sustainable development. It can be argued that this concept has bynow attained recognition as a principle of international law. A legal institution may emerge from “legal factsand arguments”, including the dissenting opinions of the International Court of Justice, which although non-binding, can nevertheless influence the formation and evolution of international legal principles over time. Such is the case with the principle of sustainable development. This article addresses the construction of theprinciple of sustainable development in the jurisprudence of the ICJ—from its origins in a dissenting opinionto its consolidation as a principle of international law. The methodology used in this contribution is legal innature, based on systematic research on history, doctrine and case law, and carried out through a qualitativeapproach.
O primeiro panorama completo e atual do Direito Internacional dos Investimentos em língua portuguesa no Brasil. Nesta obra inédita, o leitor encontra uma análise abrangente e rigorosa do regime jurídico dos investimentos estrangeiros, reunindo em um único volume o estudo sistemático da jurisprudência arbitral internacional, da evolução dos tratados de investimentos e das principais correntes doutrinárias contemporâneas.
Com linguagem clara e precisão técnica, o autor examina desde os fundamentos históricos e conceituais do regime até suas controvérsias mais recentes — incluindo padrões de proteção, responsabilidades estatais, expropriação, tratamento justo e equitativo, e a interface com políticas públicas e desenvolvimento sustentável.
O livro apresenta ainda um mapeamento atualizado das decisões arbitrais e dos acordos internacionais em vigor, oferecendo ao leitor uma visão integrada das transformações que moldam a prática atual da arbitragem de investimentos. Indispensável para pesquisadores, profissionais do direito internacional, árbitros, advogados, formuladores de políticas públicas e estudantes que buscam compreender, com profundidade e atualidade, um dos campos mais dinâmicos do direito global.
International Investment Law and Arbitration offers the first comprehensive and up-to-date overview of international investment law in Portuguese in Brazil. The volume provides a rigorous analysis of the legal regime governing foreign investments, bringing together a systematic study of international arbitral jurisprudence, the evolution of investment treaties, and the main contemporary doctrinal approaches.
Written with clarity and technical precision, the book examines the historical and conceptual foundations of the regime, its key standards of protection, and its most recent controversies, including the interface between investment law, public policies, and sustainable development.
This Article examines how international commercial arbitration is being reshaped by economic statecraft through the lens of lawfare, or the strategic use of law as a substitute for traditional coercive tools. Building on prior lawfare theory, it identifies two modalities of State-driven lawfare affecting arbitration. Instrumental lawfare arises where domestic legal measures displace arbitral authority, exemplified by assertions of exclusive jurisdiction over sanctions-related disputes. Compliance-leverage lawfare, by contrast, raises the costs and risks of participation by restricting legal services and banking access. Beyond State action, these measures generate spillovers that reshape arbitral practice by enabling private actors to exploit jurisdictional fragmentation, regulatory conflicts, and blocking statutes through contract design and forum selection. Drawing on case studies from European civil law systems, common law jurisdictions, and Asia, the Article maps how overlapping forms of lawfare produce both direct State intervention and diffuse ripple effects. It argues that while international commercial arbitration remains resilient, it is increasingly entangled with lawfare, revealing deeper intersections of law, power, and commerce in a fragmented geopolitical order.
Russia, the Soviet Union, and Imperial Continuity in International Law explores the history of imperial ideas and practices in Russian and Soviet engagements with international law. This volume traces the role of international legal doctrines and arguments in facilitating the expansion of the Russian Empire, their transition into Soviet Russia post-1917, and their use after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Particular attention is paid to Russian and Soviet international legal doctrines concerning the termination of treaties (clausula rebus sic stantibus), identity and continuity of Russia in the context of state succession, hegemonic doctrines such as the great power status of Russia (or the Soviet Union), and various interpretations of balance of power and spheres of influence, including the doctrine of socialist international law. In building its narrative, the book draws extensively on previously under-studied international law periodicals published in Russia and the Soviet Union, including the Soviet Yearbook of International Law, Soviet State and Law and Moscow Journal of International Law.
The latest issue of the International Criminal Law Review (Vol. 25, no. 6, 2025) is out. Contents include:
Established as a post-World War II response to conflict and fascism, the European Court of Human Rights is routinely characterized as the most successful human rights institution in the world. Based in Strasbourg, France, its jurisdiction extends to over 700 million people on European soil across the 46 Council of Europe member countries. The Court is the crown jewel of the Council, an international organization dedicated to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. And yet, for years, European institutions have been haunted by the specter of failure. In the shadow of rising populism, inequality, and war, faith in democracy and the rule of law has been shaken to its core. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over eight years with human rights advocates, lawyers, and judges at the European Court of Human Rights, this book asks: What kind of justice is possible through law?
Drawing on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and archival research, Jessica Greenberg tracks two paradoxical experiences of the European human rights system and the Court: on the one hand, the Court as a bureaucratic "machine;" on the other, the Court as the "conscience of Europe." She argues that human rights frameworks fuel imaginative approaches to social change, and compel legal actors to creatively navigate institutions through advocacy, persuasion, and innovative interpretation of what the law is and what it should be.
In April and May 2025, the UN International Law Commission at its 76th plenary session considered the Fourth — final — report of the Special Rapporteur on general principles of law. The Drafting Committee prepared the draft Conclusions for second reading. It is expected that in 2026 the draft general principles of law conclusions will be adopted as finalised and not significantly modified from the existing text. The hearings in the Commission, the reports of the Special Rapporteur, including an extensive bibliography, as well as the results of the States' discussions in the Sixth Committee of the UN General Assembly, provide rich research material and allow some conclusions to be drawn today. Firstly, the Commission unambiguously classified the general principles of law as an autonomous source of international law, and the representatives of States in the Sixth Committee almost unequivocally agreed with this. Secondly, the Commission divided the general principles of law into two categories: those derived from national legal systems and those formed within the international legal system, and proposed a methodology for their identification. Thirdly, the functions of the general principles of law were defined: contribute to the coherence of the international legal system, including as a means for interpreting and complementing other rules of international law; although general principles of law mainly resorted when other rules do not address a particular issue, the Commission emphasised, that this third source is not in a hierarchy below the other sources. Finally, the last version of the draft had been supplemented by the general principles of law with a limited scope of application, which may include regional principles. The Commission did not define "general principles of law" and the methodology for identifying them, which consists of inductive and deductive methods, often does not allow for distinguishing this source from rules of customary international law. However, the discussion of the "third" source of international law referred to in article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice has reached a very high level of doctrinal and inter-State debate, which allows us to expect that it will continue to be an "engine" of international law, offering for the latter possible rules to be borrowed from national systems. The confirmation of the existence of general principles of law emanating from the international legal system makes it possible to consider the basic principles of international law, proclaimed in the Declaration by the UN General Assembly in 1970, not only as an elucidation of the treaty provisions of the UN Charter, and not only as rules of customary international law, but also as the "third" source of international law. The annex to the article contains a chart giving the author’s understanding of the relationship between the various generally recognised principles and norms of international law, as well as examples of general principles of law referred to in the Commentary on the Draft Conclusions. However, the Commission’s work suggests that the romantic idea of using moral imperatives, divine revelation, or natural law to address inter-State disputes has finally become history.
In this groundbreaking work, Jean d'Aspremont undertakes the first study of the epistemology of the secret of international law, which is a specific intellectual posture whereby international law is considered to be replete with secrets that international lawyers ought to reveal. In addition to arguing that the epistemology of the secret of international law is everywhere at work in international legal thought and practice, d'Aspremont demonstrates why this posture must be scrutinized, given how much it enables certain sayings, thoughts, perceptions and actions while simultaneously disabling others, making it complicit with the worst forms of capitalism, colonialism, racism, bourgeois ideology, phallocentrism, virilism and masculinism. This book should be read by anyone interested in how international law came to do what it does and why it must be rethought.
The latest issue of the Rivista di Diritto Internazionale (Vol. 108, no. 3, 2025) is out. Contents include:
The Audiovisual Library of International Law is also available as an audio podcast on Apple, SoundCloud, and other platforms.
The latest issue of the Virginia Journal of International Law (Vol. 66, no. 1, 2025) is out. Contents include:
As international courts have risen in prominence, policymakers, practitioners and scholars observe variation in judicial deference. Sometimes international courts defer, whereby they accept a state's exercise of authority, and other times not. Differences can be seen in case outcomes, legal interpretation and reasoning, and remedial orders. How can we explain variation in deference? This book examines deference by international courts, offering a novel theoretical account. It argues that deference is explained by a court's strategic space, which is structured by formal independence, seen as a dimension of institutional design, and state preferences. An empirical analysis built on original data of the East African Court of Justice, Caribbean Court of Justice, and African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights demonstrates that robust safeguards to independence and politically fragmented memberships lend legitimacy to courts and make collective state resistance infeasible, combining to minimize deference. Persuasive argumentation and public legitimation also enable nondeference.
Recent events, particularly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have revived worries about the international regime regulating the use of force. Vastly less attention has been paid to what often precedes such attacks—threats to use force—and the prohibition on them. While the UN Charter and other legal instruments integrate the threats regime with the regime on actual uses of force, the two regimes are increasingly decoupled, in part because only one considers gradations: the use-of-force regime now identifies more serious variants like aggression and crimes of aggression; threats rules, by contrast, do not. This decoupling reflects real differences in the underlying wrongs, but it is also due to bureaucratic history and path dependence, including reluctance to criminalize threats of aggression while the underlying concept of aggression was still being developed.
As a result, international law and its institutions fail clearly to treat more serious threats, like threats to annex another state’s territory, as graver state conduct—putting aside, that is, whether criminalization is appropriate. This artificially limits the toolkit for addressing incipient aggression of the kind patently evident before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It has also impoverished consideration of potential aggression, such as may become inferable from U.S. policy concerning the Panama Canal and Greenland, before positions harden and avoidable consequences come to pass.
This Article proposes clearly defining and recognizing threats of aggression as prohibited state conduct. It evaluates the potential for deterring wrongdoing and proposes concrete and novel ways that institutions could develop and employ the rule. Such an initiative might discourage the most bellicose threats by states and even acts of aggression themselves.
What causes a Western democratic leader to stop even feigning to value the law of war? Unlike past US presidents, who at least paid lip service to the law of armed conflict, Donald Trump has openly flouted it: pardoning war criminals; denigrating the Geneva Conventions; praising torture; and discarding military norms of restraint. This gripping account depicts how Trump has upended assumptions about America's outward commitment to the law of war, exposing the conditions that make such defiance possible. Drawing on in-depth case studies and original survey analysis, Thomas Gift explains how Trump has relied on right-wing media and allies in Congress to attack the law of war – not in the shadows, but in broad daylight. Killing Machines cautions that Trump's approach is not an aberration – it's a playbook other leaders could follow. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
China is rapidly solidifying its position as a key actor in the development and governance of artificial intelligence (AI). Domestically, China is exploring a comprehensive and evolving regulatory framework. Internationally, China has transitioned from a passive recipient of external norms to a proactive norm-shaper, advancing its vision of AI governance through initiatives such as the Global AI Governance Initiative. This contrasts with its earlier accession to the World Trade Organization, when it adapted to pre-existing rules. As a leading AI power, China now influences governance practice at the international level. This paper explores two important but underexplored questions: What is China’s approach to international AI governance? How to understand China’s approach? This paper argues that China pursues a strategy of selective shaping in international AI governance, resulting in a targeted reshaping of global order. By “uploading” China-proposed institutions and norms particularly in areas of strength, China leverages new initiatives and standards to shape the developing landscape of AI governance. Meanwhile, China’s approach also faces challenges such as normative ambiguity.
