This article contextualizes and explains, from both theoretical and practical perspectives, some of the most recent and impactful changes to international trade law development in critical and emerging technology areas. It begins by describing developments in international trade law in the 20 th and 21 st centuries through the identification of four eras of that development: 1) prewar protectionism (1921-1934); 2) postwar multilateralism (1947-2000); regionalism (2001-2016); and finally, post-multilateral economic nationalism (2017-present). It then focuses on this fourth era, which has been marked by unprecedented uses of unilateral regulatory barriers to trade including discriminatory tariffs, anti-dumping and countervailing duty impositions, export controls, sanctions, investment restrictions, and industry-specific subsidies, imposed by multiple countries, and led by the three largest economies (the US, China, and the EU), all in a significant deviation from the trade law and policy of these countries in previous eras. Understanding this turn to economic nationalism, as manifest in the current era of trade law development, is key to understanding current dynamics in global trade law and policy, particularly in critical and emerging technology areas such as artificial intelligence, microcomputing, quantum computing, neurotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
In May 2020, the United Nations Secretary-General unveiled a sweeping “Data Strategy for Action by Everyone, Everywhere,” seeking to unlock the UN’s “full data potential.” The International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor followed suit, declaring in 2023 its intent to acquire advanced cyber forensic tools so to hold the “widest range of digital evidence globally.” Across international institutions, data-driven governance has become the norm, with humanitarian agencies and tribunals transforming into “data hubs and information clearinghouses.”
This paper critiques the unfettered datafication of global justice by international courts and organizations. These entities have aggressively expanded their data-driven operations in the last decade—deploying AI to predict crises, satellites to monitor conflict zones, biometric-enabled blockchain systems to track refugee movements, and social media evidence to prosecute crimes. Yet, the data that fuels these systems is often extracted from the world’s most vulnerable communities. This exposes these communities to grave risks of surveillance, hackability, and exploitation—risks further entrenched by the privileges and immunities that shield these international institutions from independent oversight. In sum, the regulatory and accountability vacuum surrounding data protection in global justice not only reinforces existing power hierarchies but also undermines the legitimacy of the very courts and organizations purporting to dismantle them.
Against this backdrop, the paper calls for a fundamental reorientation of the way international institutions govern data—recasting these institutions not as data aggregators in a digital supply chain, but as fiduciaries of the communities they aim to serve. In resisting both nation-driven and corporate-driven technological authoritarianism, international courts and organizations have an opportunity to present an alternative vision of data governance. Such a vision should draw from the international legal principles of good faith and self-determination as fundamental obligations constraining the datafication practices of these institutions. Without such a shift, international courts and organizations risk making data injustice the next frontier of global inequality.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to transform public international lawyering. ChatGPT and similar LLMs can do so in at least five ways: (i) helping to identify the contents of international law; (ii) interpreting existing international law; (iii) formulating and drafting proposals for new legal instruments or negotiating positions; (iv) assessing the international legality of specific acts; and (v) collating and distilling large datasets for international courts, tribunals, and treaty bodies.
The article uses two case studies to show how LLMs may work in international legal practice. First, it uses LLMs to identify whether particular behavioral expectations rise to the level of customary international law. In doing so, it tests LLMs’ ability to identify persistent objectors and a more egalitarian collection of state practice, as well as their proclivity to produce orthogonal or inaccurate answers. Second, it explores how LLMs perform in producing draft treaty texts, ranging from a U.S.-China extradition treaty to a treaty banning the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear command and control systems.
Based on our analysis of the five potential functions and the two more detailed case studies, the article identifies four roles for LLMs in international law: as collaborator, confounder, creator, or corruptor. In some cases, LLMs will be collaborators, complementing existing international lawyering by drastically improving the scope and speed with which users can assemble and analyze materials and produce new texts. At the same time, without careful prompt engineering and curation of results, LLMs may generate confounding outcomes, leading international lawyers down inaccurate or ambiguous paths. This is particularly likely when LLMs fail to accurately explain or defend particular conclusions. Further, LLMs also hold surprising potential to help to create new law by offering inventive proposals for treaty language or negotiations.
Most importantly, we highlight the potential for LLMs to corrupt international law by fostering automation bias in users. That is, even where analog work by international lawyers would produce different results, LLM results may soon be perceived to accurately reflect the contents of international law. The implications of this potential are profound. LLMs could effectively realign the contents and contours of international law based on the datasets they employ. The widespread use of LLMs may even incentivize states and others to push their desired views into those datasets to corrupt LLM outputs. Such risks and rewards lead us to conclude with a call for further empirical and theoretical research on LLMs’ potential to assist, reshape, or redefine international legal practice and scholarship.
International law is brought into existence by actors from a variety of perspectives--international lawyers, state representatives, bureaucrats, and organizations--and as such, international law is riddled with contradictions. It is violent and violating, reducing complex lives and histories to "good" (lawful) and "bad" (criminal) bodies subject to protection, praise, or punishment. And yet it has potential to be a means of hope, resistance, and justice for victims, survivors, and oppressed communities.
In Queering Governance and International Law, Caitlin Biddolph examines the international legal space through queer, feminist, and postcolonial lenses. In doing so, she queers governance and international law, exposing the gendered and sexualized meanings behind legal concepts like violence, and critiquing legal status quos so that more transformative, liberatory, and queerer paths to justice might be dreamt and manifested within and beyond international law. Using as a case study the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Biddolph traces the cis-heteronormative underpinnings of legal violence, and identifies ways that violence can be resisted and international law subverted to dismantle the very gendered and racial hierarchies it has reinforced.
That forcible reprisals between states are unlawful is taken for granted in contemporary international law. However, events in recent years have highlighted the resurgence of retaliatory force, challenging the foundational principles of the prohibition. This article seeks to uncover the normative assumptions underlying the prohibition on reprisals, demonstrate how these assumptions are challenged in the current international moment, and propose ways in which the prohibition can be revitalized.
In the pre-UN Charter era, forcible reprisals were considered lawful on the basis of three normative assumptions: that there was no "common judge" among sovereigns and thus self-help was justified; that self-defense and punishment were intertwined; and that international law was concerned with the rights of states rather than those of individuals. The UN Charter, in its prohibition on reprisals, sought precisely to counter these assumptions. However, as the article shows, international polarization and permissive doctrines on the use of force – in particular, those blurring the distinction between defense and punishment – have consistently eroded these foundations. The article exemplifies these erosive dynamics by focusing on the retaliatory cycle between Iran and Israel in 2024, situating it within the current moment of international polarization.
The article then proposes a normative framework to revitalize the prohibition. Chiefly, it offers a novel theoretical definition of reprisals as a form of opportunistic harm, one that cannot be justified even in the absence of a common judge. By doing so, the article acknowledges the fragmentation of the current global order while reaffirming the intrinsic wrong of reprisals even in turbulent international times.
This Research Handbook presents an in-depth examination of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Contributing authors dissect the global governance functions of the ICJ and its impact on national legal orders worldwide.
Incorporating a comprehensive analysis of the key functions of the ICJ, including the attainment of international peace and law-making, leading experts situate the jurisprudence of the Court in a broader theoretical framework. They identify its core judicial practices and delineate its interactions with international and supranational courts and tribunals such as the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the Court of Justice of the European Union and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Ultimately, this Research Handbook interrogates the centrality, power and authority of the ICJ and encourages further research in the field.
The latest issue of the International Journal of Refugee Law (Vol. 36, no. 4, December 2024) is out. Contents include:
International economic law binds states’ hands in the interest of liberalizing markets in various ways, including cross border trade in goods and services (trade) and capital (investment). The treaty regimes for both trade and investment do this by disciplining states through legal rules, while preserving a modicum of governmental power over policy. Though not always recognized as such, the preservation of policy space in these regimes typically involves exceptions-style reasoning by adjudicators – formally in the case of most trade and some investment treaties, and informally in the investment treaty regime more generally. This "exceptions paradigm" of justification has worked well in the trade regime, where it has been especially key to securing a workable balance between market disciplines and regulatory policy space in the WTO/GATT context. But it has been less successful at striking a reasonable balance in the investment regime – irrespective of whether the paradigm has been formally codified in an exceptions clause. This Article seeks to explain why, by focusing on the institutions within which this mode of justification is embedded. Certain institutional differences between these regimes help explain the varied success of exceptionalism in trade and investment, in particular: the right of action (public vs private); the degree of judicial centralization (ad hoc arbitration vs court system); and the available remedies (retrospective compensation vs prospective injunctive relief). I argue that it is trade law’s public-oriented institutions that have made the exceptions clause workable – not the other way around. By contrast, investment law’s private-oriented institutions make that system particularly inhospitable to exceptions-style justification.
The latest issue of the European Journal of International Law (Vol. 35, no. 4, November 2024) is out. Contents include:
The American Branch of the International Law Association has issued a call for panel proposals for International Law Weekend 2025, which will take place in New York City on October 23-25. The theme is "Crisis as Catalyst in International Law." The call is here. The deadline is April 20, 2025.
The latest issue of the International Criminal Law Review (Vol. 25, no. 1, 2025) is out. Contents include:
The last decade has seen the unexpected re-emergence of hybrid and internationalised courts - institutions which operate with varying combinations of national and international law, procedure, and staff. Whilst the establishment of the permanent International Criminal Court should have made hybrid mechanisms largely obsolete, hybrids have recently been established or proposed for atrocity crimes committed in Chad, South Sudan, Israel/Palestine, the Central African Republic, Kosovo, Syria, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, The Gambia, Liberia, and Ukraine.
Hybrid Justice critically examines the resurgent promise of hybrid courts. Focusing on the fields, practices, innovations, and of hybrid courts, the contributors evaluate hybrids' success, and in doing so, help to clarify the conditions and mechanisms that makes hybrids likely to succeed in their mandates and impacts. The authors focus on hybrid courts and resilience: the resilience of hybrid mechanisms to withstand political and other pressures to deliver justice and accountability, and the potential contribution of hybrids to the resilience of affected communities.
Borne out of a collaboration between lawyers, academics, and activists, this edited volume provides a uniquely comparative account of the development of hybrid courts in recent years.
