The latest issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (Vol. 59, no. 6, September 2015) is out. Contents include:
On 24-25 September 2015, the Law School at Lancaster University will be hosting a conference on the possibilities of developing “A Jurisprudence of Complexity”. The keynote speaker will be JB Ruhl (Vanderbilt Law School, USA), who has written widely on the subject of complexity theory and law. Other participants will include Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Oxford); Lucy Finchett-Maddock (Sussex); Neville Harris (Manchester); and Paul Cairney (Stirling) as well as Jamie Murray, Tom Webb, and Steven Wheatley (all Lancaster) The conference will also hear from experts in complexity theory in other disciplines including Sylvia Walby (Sociology) and, Robert Geyer (Politics).
The conference will be of particular interest to international law and human rights scholars examining the significance of systems theory in general and complexity theory in particular to the discipline. Relevant papers include:
- ‘Complexity theory and human rights’
- ‘The ‘Consensus Approach’ of the ECtHR as a Rational Response to Complexity: Taming Uncertainty through Collective Intelligence’
- ‘Human Rights Outcomes in Complexity and the Problem of Causation’
- ‘Using Critical Mass in Collective Decision Making to Better Understand the Formation of Customary International Law’
- ‘Prosecuting Transnational Terrorist Groups before the International Criminal Court: How Complexity Theory Can Explain the Accountability Gap’
We could not have a global economy without a system to resolve commercial disputes across borders, but the international regime that performs this key role bears little resemblance to other institutions underpinning the global economy. A hybrid of private arbitral institutions, international treaties, and domestic laws and courts, the regime for commercial dispute resolution shows that effective transborder institutions can take a variety of forms. This book offers the first comprehensive social scientific account of this surprisingly effective regime. It maps and explains its evolution since the Industrial Revolution, both at the global level and in the United States, Argentina, and China. The book shows how both political economy approaches and socio-legal theories have shaped institutional outcomes. While economic interests have been the chief determinants, legal processes have played a key role in shaping the form institutions take. The regime for commercial dispute resolution therefore remains between interests and law.
Local Space, Global Life engages with the expansive, ground-level and intertwined operations of international law and the development project by discussing the current international focus on local jurisdictions. Since the mid-1980s, and through the discourse of decentralization, municipalities and cities in emerging nations have become the preferred spaces in which to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development. Through an ethnographic study of Bogotá's recent development experience and the city's changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, Luis Eslava interrogates this rationale and exposes the contradictions involved in the international turn to the local. Attentive to historical and current transformations, norms and praxis, and both ideology and materiality, he provides an innovative reading of the nature of international law and the development project, and reveals their impact on local spaces and lives at the urban periphery of today's world order.
The latest issue of the International Criminal Law Review (Vol. 15, no. 4, 2015) is out. Contents include:
From its founding as a little-known and seldom-used multilateral treaty for the resolution of international investment disputes, the ICSID Convention has become one of the most widely known and widely used international economic conventions. With 159 signatories, thousands of international investment treaties rely upon its provisions for the resolution of disputes and hundreds of arbitral awards have been rendered under its aegis.
Fifty years after the finalization of the Convention's text in 1965, this meeting of the Investment Treaty Forum, organized in partnership with the ICSID Secretariat, looks at the history of the Convention, the legal issues raised in its interpretation and application, and its continuing role in the investment treaty regime.
The latest issue of Ocean Development & International Law (Vol. 46, no. 3, 2015) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Institutions (Vol. 21, no. 3, July-September 2015) is out. Contents include:
This conference brings together leading international experts to assess the effectiveness of international law in ensuring responsibility for the injurious cyber activities of non-state actors. In particular, this conference addresses three critical international legal questions: Can states be held responsible for injurious acts committed by non-state actors in or through cyberspace? Can individuals be held criminally responsible for malicious cyber operations and how is jurisdiction established in cyberspace? What challenges do international courts face when conducting cyber investigations and how do international courts assess the probity of cyber evidence?
The latest issue of the International & Comparative Law Quarterly (Vol. 64, no. 3, July 2015) is out. Contents include:
Over the past twenty-five years, significant changes in the conduct of wars have increasingly placed civilians in traditional military roles - employing civilians to execute drone strikes, the 'targeted killing' of suspected terrorists, the use of private security contractors in combat zones, and the spread of cyber attacks. Under the laws of armed conflict, civilians cannot be targeted unless they take direct part in hostilities. Once civilians take action, they become targets. This book analyses the complex question of how to identify just who those civilians are.
Identifying the Enemy examines the history of civilian participation in armed conflict and how the law has responded to such action. It asks the crucial question: what is 'direct participation in hostilities'? The book slices through the attempts to untie this Gordian knot, and shows that the changing nature of warfare has called into question the very foundation of the civilian/military dichotomy that is at the heart of the law of armed conflict.
The latest issue of the World Trade Review (Vol. 14, Special Issue, July 2015) is out. Contents include:
This book aims to identify opportunities, limits and obstacles to the exercise of unilateral jurisdiction in the common interest by states that have no (or at least not the strongest) connection to a situation. In doing so, it seeks to find entry points in the international law of jurisdiction for the realization of cosmopolitanism.The author investigates, from both a normative and an empirical point of view, whether the international legal system accommodates the exercise of unilateral jurisdiction in a cosmopolitan fashion by states or regional organizations such as the European Union, whether there are indications in practice that such jurisdiction is indeed exercised, and what limitations, if any, are or should be imposed. In this investigation, the book draws on insights from public international law, legal theory, and political philosophy.
In the years since 9/11, counter-terrorism law and policy has proliferated across the world. This handbook comprehensively surveys how the law has been deployed in all aspects of counter-terrorism. It provides an authoritative and critical analysis of counter-terrorism laws in domestic jurisdictions, taking a comparative approach to a range of jurisdictions, especially the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, and Europe.
The latest issue of the International Community Law Review (Vol. 17, no. 3, 2015) is out. Contents include:
The Clean Trade project is designed to block the importation of natural resources that have been exploited in violation of the human right to permanent sovereignty over these natural resources (‘exploited resources’). To this end, the Clean Trade project envisages that states would impose a direct embargo on exploited resources, and would impose duties on products from intermediate states that import exploited resources. This note, written in the context of the Clean Trade Project, examines the WTO legality of these two mechanisms. It concludes that, most likely, these mechanisms are WTO-legal. In the event that they are not, this note also considers a third option, namely, a waiver from WTO obligations, along the lines of the waiver for the Kimberley Process for ‘conflict diamonds’.
At the time when the Syrian Civil War has re-ignited the interest of international lawyers for the study of Civil Wars, this article reviews the core issues and different doctrinal positions present in the international legal debates triggered by the Spanish Civil War. It pays particular attention to the contributions of the first two British judges at the International Court of Justice, A. D. McNair (1946-1955) and H. Lauterpacht (1955-1960) to these debates. Their writings can be seen as respectively representative of the two stages through which British international lawyers went in the international legal debates on the Spanish Civil War. Up to early 1938, British International lawyers adopted a characteristically apologetic approach to the policy undertaken by the British Government on the advice of the British Foreign Office. The second stage, from early 1938 to the end of the Spanish Civil War in March 1939, was in turn informed by a “practitioner's approach” to the analysis of the domestic cases brought before the British courts as a result of the hostilities. The article concludes with an analysis of the case for British “benevolent neutrality to the Nationalists” in the Spanish Civil War, reviewing the underlying motives which historians have highlighted as lurking behind the British-led non-intervention policy in the Spanish Civil War.
The latest issue of the Virginia Journal of International Law (Vol. 55, no. 2, Spring 2015) is out. Contents include:
