Sunday, June 8, 2025
European Union Court of Justice Profiles
New Issue: The Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals
The latest issue of The Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals (Vol. 24, no. 1, 2025) is out. Contents include:- Face à Face: Interview with Christine Van den Wyngaert
- International Judicial Function Symposium
- Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, Lorenzo Palestini, Guillaume Guez Maillard, & Aditya Laddha, Introduction: the International Judicial Function under Pressure
- Yusra Suedi, Advisory Jurisdiction and Consent: the Thin Line between Advisory and Contentious Proceedings
- Christian Vidal-León, The Justification for Reasoning from Precedent in International Adjudication
- Marco Dimetto, Judicial Propriety and Mandate: Straying into Non-Essentials and Resolving the Dispute
- Johannes Hendrik Fahner, Standards of Appellate Review in International Dispute Settlement: Current Use and Conceptual Challenges
- Juliana Valle Pereira Guerra, Who Holds the Final Word? Navigating the Hidden Power Struggle between Authentic Interpreters and Judicial Authorities in International Treaty Law
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Modirzadeh: “Violent, Vicious, and Fast”: LSCO Lawyering and the Transformation of American IHL
This article examines a phenomenon unfolding within the United States’ military legal establishment: an effort by a segment of military lawyers to define how the law of armed conflict (LOAC) applies to the wars they anticipate fighting in the future. I refer to this effort as LSCO lawyering: the development, advancement, and institutionalization of a vision of LOAC tailored to large-scale combat operations (LSCOs), understood here as multi-domain warfare against a peer adversary such as China. Through extensive engagement with military writings and conversations with current and former armed-forces legal advisers from the United States and allied or partner forces, I trace how LSCO lawyering reflects a diagnosis of crisis — a perceived mismatch between prevailing legal expectations and the operational realities of high-intensity war — and a response that aims not to dismantle LOAC but to restore it on terms seen as credible under conditions of existential conflict.
At the heart of this project lies a reconfiguration of what I call American IHL: the United States’ distinctive assemblage of interpretations, practices, normative commitments, and exceptions that shape its approach to LOAC. While LSCO lawyering is often framed as a modest clarification of existing law, I suggest that it functions as something more ambitious — a legal and institutional move to strip away what are described as counterterrorism-era overlays and to reassert a baseline vision of LOAC that privileges military necessity, internal discretion, and speed over external constraint or civilian protection. The result is not lawlessness but an attempt to ensure that legal interpretation does not, in the view of its proponents, impose normatively undue or operationally unsustainable limits on commanders preparing to fight — violent, vicious, and fast — in a war that is framed to be potentially existential.
Although this legal reasoning emerges from within the U.S. national-security context, its implications extend beyond American military and LOAC doctrine. The interpretive logic underpinning LSCO lawyering may find resonance with all states that seek to frame their approach to the conduct of hostilities as lawful. In this sense, LSCO lawyering is not necessarily only an American legal development. It is also a project with the potential to reorder certain expectations — including about what law requires, who interprets it, and how it should structure violence in war — far beyond the Pentagon.
Cohen: Outbound Investment Restrictions and International Law's Challenge
The Outbound Investment Rule, restricting U.S. investment in certain Chinese advanced technology sectors, has largely been portrayed as an incremental measure, a modest extension to fill loopholes in the existing investment screening regime. But while perhaps the logical next step in the securitization of the economy, the Outbound Investment Rule actually reflects a momentous shift in the relationship between governments and business, one playing out in the United States and around the world and worth attention. Unlike traditional investment screening, the Outbound Investment Rule operates like a sanctions regime, designed not to protect the U.S. economy, but to hamper the advancement of another. And in so doing, the Outbound Investment Rule reveals a broader global shift to geoeconomic competition that existing international economic law rules are ill-suited to manage. New rules are needed to minimize and manage the inevitable conflicts.
Marks: Trucanini's Stare: Reconsidering Dignity in Theory and Practice
A central concept in international human rights law and many national constitutions is human dignity. Departing from established approaches to dignity in philosophy and legal theory, Susan Marks takes dignity in everyday life ('dignified care', 'dignity in the workplace', etc.) as a starting point for reconsidering the concept's history and significance. The result is a highly original work which gives particular attention to colonial and post-colonial engagements with dignity, and emphasises the character of human dignity as not just an idea or abstract value, but also a lived experience that cannot be understood without reference to social structures and the inequalities and hierarchies they reproduce. If dignity is an attribute which all human beings possess purely by virtue of being human, Marks shows that it is also an element within the systemic operations of privilege and power.
Friday, June 6, 2025
Chesterman: Silicon Sovereigns: Artificial Intelligence, International Law, and the Tech-Industrial Complex
Artificial intelligence is reshaping science, society, and power. Yet many debates over its likely impact remain fixated on extremes: utopian visions of universal benefit and dystopian fears of existential doom, or an arms race between the U.S. and China, or the Global North and Global South. What’s missing is a serious conversation about distribution — who gains, who loses, and who decides. The global AI landscape is increasingly defined not just by geopolitical divides, but by the deepening imbalance between public governance and private control. As governments struggle to keep up, power is consolidating in the hands of a few tech firms whose influence now rivals that of states. If the twentieth century saw the rise of international institutions, the twenty-first may be witnessing their eclipse — replaced not by a new world order, but by a digital oligarchy. This essay explores what that shift means for international law, global equity, and the future of democratic oversight in an age of silicon sovereignty.
New Issue: International Journal of Human Rights
The latest issue of the International Journal of Human Rights (Vol. 29, no. 5, 2025) is out. Contents include:- Mari Huttunen, A tale of two sovereigns: the responsibility to protect and the competing notions of responsible sovereignty
- Katie Morris, Reconceptualising socioeconomic rights: a case for care ethics
- Marina Lostal, One-dimensional law: a critique of the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment
- Felipe Jaramillo Ruiz, Additive entanglement and intersectionality in UN human rights monitoring: examining the inclusion of disability
- Pierre Bosset, Cultural human rights as new foundations for interculturalist policies: a rights-based approach from Québec*
- Elke Evrard & Tine Destrooper, Learning from the past? How the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, civil society initiatives and survivor stories shape young Cambodians’ understanding of non-recurrence
- Steven Malby, Beyond sword and shield: the UN human rights system and criminal law
- Ling Han & Paolo De Stefani, Protecting fundamental values through the global human rights sanction regime: China's challenges to the EU's normative power
Thursday, June 5, 2025
New Volume: Canadian Yearbook of International Law
- Articles
- Camille Martini, From Fact to Applicable Law: What Role for the International Climate Change Regime in Investor-State Arbitration?
- Rémi Fuhrmann, Légitimités conflictuelles: le droit international humanitaire entre légitimité du statut et légitimité de la cause
- Anna Rahel Fischer & Bernard Duhaime, “The Purloined Letter”: Migrant Disappearances, Systematic Impunity, and States’ Risk Awareness
- Miriam Cohen & Renan Teles, L’appropriation de la transmission des traumatismes par le droit: le préjudice transgénérationnel dans la jurisprudence de la Cour pénale internationale
- Carol Dyck, Arctic Governance in the Face of Climate Change: A Case for “Inclusive Regionalism”
- Obiora Chinedu Okafor, Udoka Owie, Okechukwu Effoduh, & Rahina Zarma, Explaining the Comparatively Less Robust Human Rights Impact of the ECOWAS Court on Legislative and Judicial Decision-making, Process, and Action in Nigeria
- Godwin E.K. Dzah, The Interaction between International and Domestic Law, Aqua Nullius, and Water-mediated Claims in Canada
- Akinwumi Ogunranti, The Relationality of Community Development Agreements towards a Human Rights Due Diligence Good Faith Requirement
- Symposium on the African Financial Architecture and the African Multilateral Financial Institutions in Context
- Olabisi D. Akinkugbe, Preface
- Olabisi D. Akinkugbe, African Financial Architecture: Voice, Representation, Preferred Creditor Status, and the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions
- Gertrude Amorkor Amarh, A New Dawn in Credit Rating for Africa? A Review of the Africa Credit Rating Agency
- Ohiocheoya (Ohio) Omiunu & Ayodele Olabiyi, Knowledge Production and the Global Energy Transition: A Critical Appraisal of the Influence of International Financial Institutions on African Multilateral Financial Institutions
- Otieno Mbori, The African Development Bank’s Role in Financing the Green Energy Transition Harrison
- Florence Shako, Towards Dismantling Colonial Continuities: The Role of the African Export-Import Bank in Climate Financing in Africa
New Issue: Questions of International Law
- Regulating activities in the cyberspace: Open issues of International and European law
- Introduced by Gian Maria Farnelli
- Alessandra Sardu, Non-intervention and cyberspace
- Isabella Brunner, Attributing cyber operations under International law: Political and legal aspects
- Marco Argentini, Navigating Private Obligations in Cybersecurity: Perspectives from Private International Law
- Susanna Villani, Defending the security of the eu constitutional order against malicious cyber activity: reflections on the cyber targeted sanctions regime
- Victor Stoica, AI for good: the maintenance of international peace and security
Wednesday, June 4, 2025
Schefer, Polanco, & Sauvé: International Economic Law as Symphony: Thomas Cottier and the Harmonies of Trade
This open access book brings together some of the most eminent scholars of international trade to celebrate the scholarly, diplomatic, and institution-building achievements of Thomas Cottier, Professor Emeritus of International Economic Law at the University of Bern and founder of the World Trade Institute.
Over his half-century career, Thomas Cottier has promoted the development of international trade law by shaping our understanding of how multiple layers of law interact to form a global legal system. While multilateral trade law is the “melody” of the system, it is made fuller by a host of regional and national layers of harmonising – and sometimes discordant – legal rules.
Covering both general trade policy and the economic relations between Switzerland and the EU, the chapters examine Thomas Cottier's fundamental belief in the necessity of studying the interaction of every level of governance – local, national, and international – when considering the policies of economic exchange between countries, as well as his cosmopolitan belief in the need to foster a global community dedicated to bettering the lives of individuals around the world. The special relationship between the EU and Switzerland is addressed, honouring Professor Cottier's dedication to the political debates within Switzerland on the extent to which the country should participate in the European project, exemplifying the themes of multilayered governance and the common concerns of all people.
Call for Papers: Popular International Law Workshop
Tuesday, June 3, 2025
Kulamadayil: The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law
This open access book critically examines the role international law plays in post-colonial countries, which primarily rely on the exploitation of their natural resources for economic and human development.
Since the 1990s, expressions such as the 'resource curse' and 'paradox of plenty' have been associated with unequal patterns of power and wealth distribution in post-colonial and neo-colonial countries. They have also been applied to the ecological and social costs of natural resources exploitation, and the planetary costs of mineral resources-based production and consumption patterns.
Taking various resource-curse and paradox-of-plenty theories as a starting point, the book illustrates how the law's role in resource-cursed countries is at once constitutive, preventive, remedial and punitive. It does so by engaging with various fields of public international law. The book revisits how rights and principles such as sovereignty over natural resources and economic self-determination were applied in decolonisation processes; studies the proliferation of international treaties protecting foreign property rights; and zooms in on various contract models used in the mineral resources sector to evaluate the distributional choices of cost and revenue.
Monday, June 2, 2025
Ioannides: The Predominant Interest Concept and Maritime Delimitation: Safeguarding Predictability and Enhancing Equitableness
Exploring how international jurisprudence has catalysed the development of maritime delimitation law, this accessible book explores the ‘predominant interest’ concept and analyses global case studies, as well as landmark legal proceedings. Nicholas A. Ioannides provides a comprehensive overview of the delimitation process, identifying the criteria used to determine how maritime areas are delimited.
The book highlights how international courts and tribunals in delimitation cases have mainly relied on geographical factors, disregarding non-geographical elements, although they are at the core of the continental shelf and Exclusive Economic Zone concepts. Ultimately, Ioannides suggests that non-geographical factors should be taken into account in maritime delimitation in aggregation under the cloak of ''predominant interest'' in order to reach an equitable result. Highlighting how predictability should be safeguarded, and equitability should be enhanced, Ioannides outlines the importance of, among others, fishing, security, defence and navigation interests for individual states arguing for control over maritime zones.
Conference: Towards a Global Ecological-Economic Legal Framework – Looking Ahead to Paris: Global Legal Dialogues for a Sustainable Future
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Webinar: Transitional Justice for Israel-Palestine in Comparative Perspective
Saturday, May 31, 2025
Conference: Is There Anything Asian about International Law in Asia, and Should There Be?
New Issue: International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law
The latest issue of the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law (Vol. 40, no. 2, 2025) is out. Contents include:
- Special Issue: Ecological Civilisation Building and the Law of the Sea
- Keyuan Zou & Lei Zhang, Ecological Civilisation in the Law of the Sea
- Anastasia M Telesetsky, Ocean Disaster Risk Reduction: Designing Anticipatory Actions for Vulnerable Households Engaged in Marine Capture Fisheries
- Christopher Whomersley, Innovations in the Institutional Arrangements in the BBNJ Agreement
- Xiangxin Xu & Li Chen, Navigating a New Course: The Likely Impact of the BBNJ Agreement on the Establishment of Area-Based Management Tools by the ISA
- Volker Röben, Ocean Power: Floating Nuclear Power Plants under the Law of the Sea
- Yen-Chiang Chang, Seokwoo Lee, & Xingyi Duan, Seeking an Advisory Opinion from International Judicial Bodies on Legal Issues concerning the Discharge of Radioactive Wastewater
- Matteo Bedendi & Lorenzo Schiano di Pepe, A New Chapter of Ocean Governance and the European Union: Codification Efforts and Prospects of a Moratorium at the International Seabed Authority
- Sen Wang, Revisiting the Common but Differentiated Responsibility Principle in the Prevention and Control of Marine Plastic Pollution
Friday, May 30, 2025
New Issue: Yale Journal of International Law
- David Landau, Transitional Norms in Constitutions
- Zachary D. Clopton, Foreign Law on the Ground
- 50th Anniversary Conference: Celebrating the Work of W. Michael Reisman
- Lea Brilmayer, Option or Obligation? Third-State Support for the Enforcement of International Law
- Manuel Casas, Non-Judicialization and Dejudicialization in International Law
- Eyal Benvenisti, Looking Into the Future of the Law on International Organizations: Insights from the New Havel School
- Lucie Olejnikova, Evelyn Ma, & Steven A. Mitchell, Walking down Memory Lane on the 50th Anniversary of YJIL: An Exhibit in Honor of Professor W. Michael Reisman, Teacher, Jurist, Enduring Patron, and Inspiration
Jones: No Future for Future Generations: Who is International Environmental Law For?
The idea that the environment must be protected for future generations has been gaining traction in recent years. This article argues that the concept of future generations, as deployed in international environmental law, is, however, deeply exclusionary, with only some humans being envisaged as future generations. It is furthermore argued that the concept is anthropocentric in that it focuses only on human future generations. The article discusses whether the concept can be recast considering these critiques, deploying queer and decolonial approaches to do so. In particular, Indigenous understandings of future generations are highlighted as offering an alternative framing. The article concludes by arguing that legal concepts must be carefully designed to ensure the construction of a future whereby climate change and environmental degradation are addressed in an equitable and just way, providing three pathways that can be used to begin to reframe the concept of future generations accordingly.
Call for Submissions: Tariffs: Emerging challenges in global trade
Thursday, May 29, 2025
New Issue: European Journal of International Law
The latest issue of the European Journal of International Law (Vol. 36, no. 1, February 2025) is out. Contents include:- Editorial
- EJIL: News!: Call for Expressions of Interest for a New Co-Editor-in-Chief of EJIL; EJIL: News!: Thank you Wanshu – Welcome Abhimanyu!; In This Issue; In This Issue – Reviews; Vital Statistics
- EJIL Foreword
- Susan Marks, If the World Is a Family, What Kind of Family Is It?
- Articles
- Jarrod Hepburn, The Legal Justification for the Doctrine of Legitimate Expectations in International Investment Law
- Ka Lok Yip, Demystifying the Right to Life during the Conduct of Hostilities: Theories, Methods, Practices
- Jens T Theilen, Civilizational Hierarchies and the Notion of ‘Europe’ in the European Convention on Human Rights
- Roaming Charges
- Places with a Soul: Kibera, Nairobi
- Review Essays
- Fuad Zarbiyev, Of Theory and Reality, and Airplanes and Helicopters
- Jed Odermatt, Reimagining International Law Teaching
- Book Reviews
- Ergün Cakal, reviewing Ezgi Yildiz, Between Forbearance and Audacity: The European Court of Human Rights and the Norm against Torture
- Güneş Ünüvar, reviewing Charalampos Giannakopoulos, Manifestations of Coherence and Investor-State Arbitration
- Anni Pues, reviewing Sophie Rigney, Fairness and Rights in International Criminal Procedure
- Kirsten Sellars, reviewing Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
- Eran Sthoeger, reviewing Carlos Espósito & Kate Parlett, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the International Court of Justice
- Book Review Symposium: The Hague Academy
- Juliana Santos de Carvalho, Three Feminists Walk into the Hague Academy: Ease and Discomfort in an Affective Space
- Sué González Hauck, Order in and through Law at the Hague Academy: Examining a Century of Legal Influence and Controversy
- Valentina Vadi, The Health of Nations at The Hague
- Niccolò Ridi & Thomas Schultz, Distantly Reading the Recueil des Cours: Authority and Authorities in the History of the Hague Academy of International Law
- León Castellanos-Jankiewicz & Momchil Milanov, A Well-known Stranger: André Mandelstam – From Empire to Human Rights
- Vladyslav Lanovoy, The Hague Academy and the World Court: Travelling Together in the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes
- The Last Page
- The Vineyard
New Issue: International Community Law Review
The latest issue of the International Community Law Review (Vol. 27, no. 3, 2025) is out. Contents include:- Laura Di Gianfrancesco, Questioning the Use of the Veto: The Veto Initiative and the General Assembly’s Role as an Accountability Forum for the Security Council
- Henrique Marcos, Lex Specialis as a Reason-Giving Norm: Balancing Norm Specificity and Individual Rights in Times of Crisis
- Abdullah Abdullatif, Jamal Barafi, Salam Al Kasem, & Suhaib H. Anagreh, Safety Zones in Outer Space: A Means Towards Achieving Sustainability and Preventing Conflicts in Space Activities
- Marco Longobardo, The Monetary Gold Principle and States’ Obligations Triggered by a Serious Risks of Atrocities Being Committed by Another State: The Cases of the Duty to Prevent Genocide and the Duty to Ensure Respect for IHL
New Issue: World Trade Review
The latest issue of the World Trade Review (Vol. 24, no. 2, May 2025) is out. Contents include:- Special Issue: Disruptions and the Reorientation of the Trade Regime: Towards a Trade and Sustainability 2.0?
- Weihuan Zhou, Trade and Sustainability in an Era of Re-globalization
- Bernard Hoekman & Douglas Nelson, Industrial Policy and International Cooperation
- Mandy Meng Fang, Multi-Purpose Green Industrial Policy and the WTO: An Unavoidable Clash?
- Pasha L. Hsieh, Green Regionalism in World Trade Law
- Gregory Messenger, Free Trade Agreements as Sites of Economic Diplomacy: Agreeing Common Standards for Sustainable Development
- Sanvid Tuljapurkar & Ruosi Zhang, Developing Countries' Participation in Environmental Services Negotiations: What are the Challenges and What Should be Done?
- Giulia Claudia Leonelli, Critical Raw Materials, the Net-Zero Transition and the ‘Securitization’ of the Trade and Climate Change Mitigation Nexus: Pinpointing Environmental Risks and Charting a New Path for Transnational Decarbonization
- Weihuan Zhou, Victor Crochet, & Haoxue Wang, Demystifying China's Critical Minerals Strategies: Rethinking ‘De-risking’ Supply Chains
- Addressing Competitiveness Concerns of EU exporters with Industrial Policy: The Role of Innovation Support Michael Jakob, Michael Mehling
- Tolulope Anthony Adekola & Bryan Mercurio, mRNA Technology Transfer Hub and Intellectual Property: Towards a more Equitable and Sustainable Model
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Conference: 2025 ILA-ASIL Asia-Pacific Research Forum
Roht-Arriaza: Fighting Grand Corruption: Transnational and Human Rights Approaches in Latin America and Beyond
Grand corruption-systemic, large-scale, and top-down misappropriation of public resources for private gain-remains a pervasive problem around the world. It affects the ability of governments to educate, feed, and care for their people. It undermines human rights, perpetuates impunity, and erodes trust in government and the judiciary. It strengthens disgruntlement, authoritarianism, and insurgency. Corruption, however, is not a static force. In this work, Naomi Roht-Arriaza explores how corruption has changed, and how new anti-corruption thinking, especially in Latin America, centers human rights, victims' access to justice, and reparations. Roht-Arriaza shows how activists have used outside pressure and support for local actors where state institutions have been captured and foregrounds anti-corruption considerations in dealing with transitional justice and atrocity crimes. Written with engaging stories and examples, this book will appeal to lawyers, scholars of Latin America, and anyone else interested in fighting kleptocrats with the goal of reclaiming the common good.








