In recent years, a growing number of countries have courted controversy by regulating activities outside their borders. They have used extraterritorial lawmaking to cultivate competitive global markets, strengthen or weaken data privacy, combat foreign terrorism and military aggression, promote human rights abroad, and suppress political dissent at home. This Article explores whether extraterritorial

On October 7, 2023, Palestinian armed groups, chiefly Hamas's armed wing, breached the fence around the Gaza strip and launched attacks on Israeli territory. Over several hours, Palestinian fighters killed 1,269 people, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture, and took 253 hostages. The same day, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “Israel is at war,” and the Israel

On November 9, 2023, Prime Minister Albanese of Australia and then Prime Minister Natano of Tuvalu signed the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty in Rarotonga (Falepili Union Treaty or the Treaty). The preamble explains that “the concept of Falepili . . . connotes the traditional values of good neighbourliness, duty of care and mutual respect.” It sets a groundbreaking precedent for Small Island

Time is a Pandora's box that international lawyers have long been reluctant to fully open. Perhaps unwilling to tackle the complexities this elusive concept presents, or loath to confront past wrongs and future threats that might arise from the fabled box, international jurists have left core questions of time and international law largely underexplored. In so doing, however, they have overlooked time

This Article reinterprets the 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) to show how it might rationally strengthen protections for the environment against intentional damage by states, particularly during armed conflict. The Article applies the orthodox rules of treaty interpretation to analyze in depth the Convention text

About a decade ago, the neural network of the international financial system underwent an identity crisis. Since its establishment in 1973, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) had become the world's dominant system for transmitting information about financial transactions, handling up to 20 million messages per day across 212 jurisdictions. The Belgium-based company

The international legal norm that prohibits forcible annexations of territory is foundational to modern international law. It lies at the core of three projects that have been central to the enterprise: (1) to settle title to territory as the basis for establishing state authority; (2) to regulate the use of force across settled borders; and (3) to provide for people within settled borders collectively

As a field of practice, international human rights law (IHRL) is in constant motion. The four books under review explore the legal, political, and civic dynamics that continuously shape and reshape this vibrant area of law. In this Essay, I underscore two important trends in contemporary IHRL scholarship that these books highlight. First, these works share a strong emphasis on agency, understood as

On December 19, 2023, the U.S. Department of State announced the geographic coordinates defining the outer limits of the U.S. continental shelf in areas beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast. For convenience, the United States—and also this Essay—refers to the portion of a country's continental shelf that is beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast as the “extended continental shelf,” or ECS. The

In the last few years, states have advanced various proposals for cooperation in the use of countermeasures. In this Article, we ask whether, and if so under what conditions, states may lawfully collaborate in the taking of countermeasures against other states. We distinguish five different types of collaboration: (1) independent but coordinated action; (2) secondment; (3) joint action; (4) aid and

For several decades, civil society has sought to impose greater responsibility on companies for cross-border social wrongs. Multiple legal subfields and initiatives have emerged to take on this work: corporate social responsibility (CSR); business and human rights (BHR); responsible business conduct codes; environment, social, and governance (ESG) standards; and corporate due diligence schemes, among

The International Law Commission (ILC or Commission) held its seventy-fourth session at its seat in Switzerland from April 24 to June 2 and from July 3 to August 4, 2023, and met fully in person for the first time since the COVID-19 global health pandemic. The Commission, which has had a gender imbalance in its composition, was chaired for the first time by two successive female chairs: Nilüfer Oral

Asset recovery is a fundamental principle of anti-corruption law, without which the financial damage from corruption cannot be repaired. Yet recovering assets is notoriously difficult and time-consuming, and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption provides little technical or institutional support to facilitate such returns. To remedy this, we propose the creation of a transnational asset

International law prohibits states from intervening in the internal and external affairs of other states, but only if the method of intervention is coercive. This Article argues that coercion can be understood in two different ways or models. First, as coercion-as-extortion, a demand coupled with a threat of harm or the infliction of harm, done to extract some kind of concession from the victim state—in

More than half a century after the UN's adoption of the International Convention on the Prohibition of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, a debate has emerged over whether to extend the Convention's protections to religious discrimination. This Article uses history to intervene in the debate. It argues that racial and religious othering were mutually co-constitutive in the colonial encounter and foundational

One of the most important developments in international law for the protection of displaced women and girls—the implied non-refoulement obligation in the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has received little scholarly or jurisprudential attention. This Article presents, for the first time, a doctrinal analysis of the full corpus of asylum complaints decided by the Committee

Fines and other financial sanctions are frequently imposed by criminal justice systems around the world. Yet they also raise grave concerns about economic discrimination. Unless they are perfectly scaled to defendants’ financial circumstances, they will penalize poor persons far more than rich ones—and poor defendants’ inability to pay can lead to further penalties like imprisonment or additional financial

Dear Editors in Chief:The recent uprising for racial justice marked a pivotal shift in national and global debates on race. One enduring legacy is that the language we use to speak, think, and label people is consequential. Most style guides that previously called for lowercasing Black altered their positions. This letter to the editors urges the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) to join

The international investment regime is in flux. The mainstream practice of investment law and arbitration works on the basis of the regime's foundations in contract and property law. However, critical scholarship in the field has unearthed the coloniality of power that permeates both the practice of international investment law and the current reform exercise led by the United Nations Commission on

In the 2022–2023 season, more than 104,000 tourists visited Antarctica. This represents an increase of more than 40 percent compared to the 2019–2020 pre-pandemic season. This Current Development discusses this trend and the limits of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties, which govern on the basis of consensus, in responding with regulatory action. Options for strengthening regulation in this

The 1918 Soviet default is the longest and most complex sovereign debt dispute in history. The first settlement with a major Western power came with the United Kingdom in 1986. It followed a settlement almost twenty years earlier for claims arising from the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states. We show how the two negotiations became intertwined and prompted both states to take pragmatic positions

This Article argues that the Gulf Crisis of 1990–91, the first major international crisis of the post-Cold War era, was a constitutive moment for international law. The Article examines the contests in the United Nations over the meaning of the Crisis and shows that these contests were also over the meaning of cooperation under international law in the “new world order.” The Article casts the Gulf

Over the last three decades, international lawyers and institutions have come to understand constitution-making as an accepted technique of international law and a means of delivering peace and security. In defending this technique from its critics, scholars have drawn on a particular tradition of constitution-making that understands constitutionalism as a lawful form of international action, realizable

The World Trade Organization is at an important institutional crossroads, buffeted by critique and with its once-heralded dispute system in doubt. Despite some achievements at the 2022 MC12 Ministerial Conference, the WTO appears in crisis, without a strong institutional mandate. In this Article, we offer a vision for its future, rooted in a particular interpretation of its past. The WTO's legal architecture

The International Law Commission (ILC) held its seventy-third session from April 18 to June 3 and from July 4 to August 5, 2022 in Geneva, under the chairmanship of Dire Tladi (South Africa). This session was the final one of the quinquennium, which originally would have occurred in the summer of 2021. (Since the Commission did not meet in the summer of 2020 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic

The “temporary golden age” of international courts is likely over. States seeking to provide oversight mechanisms and individual remedies at the international level are likely to opt for less intrusive and more flexible alternatives to adjudication. This Article analyzes the phenomenon of international complaint mechanisms through a detailed case study of the Ombudsperson to the ISIL and Al-Qaida sanctions

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, initiated on February 24, 2022, is among the most—if not the most—significant shocks to the global order since World War II. This piece assesses the stakes of the invasion for the core principles that lie at the heart of contemporary international law and the world order that it has helped to create. We argue, relying in part on the other contributions to the October 2022

The resurgence of racist rhetoric and policies concerning people fleeing the war in Ukraine serves as a reminder that the ostensible goals of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and 1967 Protocol are regularly eschewed by states making decisions about how to allocate grants of asylum. This Essay makes the claim that racial tiering of protection-seekers demonstrates that states use

While Western imperialism played a crucial role in the creation of modern international law, it is ever more important to analyze the engagements of non-Western imperialist powers with the field so as to comprehend the changing global patterns of legalized violence and expansionism. In this Essay, we analyze Russia's international legal arguments in support of its use of force against Ukraine through

Economic sanctions have been the West's response of choice to Russia's full-scale aggression in Ukraine. Predictably, speculation abounds as to what these sanctions portend for future responses to acts of interstate aggression. The principles underpinning the “trading with the enemy” laws of a seemingly bygone era have resurfaced but applied not to the sanctioning powers’ own enemies but in solidarity

The entrenched understanding of the law governing nationality does not permit a state to look beyond a ship's flag and registration to ascertain its nationality during peacetime. Nonetheless, this very understanding also allows a state to pierce the veil of a ship's registration to ascertain its enemy character during wartime. However, the war in Ukraine has witnessed fresh state practice whereby states

Concerns over the weaponization of energy during the war in Ukraine have revived state anxieties about overreliance on certain foreign energy sources. This Essay argues that instruments of energy trade and investment protection have helped to lock states into dangerous dependencies. Trade and investment law can inhibit energy security strategies designed to diversify away from unreliable sources and

The 1965 Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters has increasingly been used by its member states to demonstrate their territorial claims, including in the Falklands dispute and the Israel-Palestine conflict. This has now arisen in the Russo-Ukrainian war, as conflicting declarations have been formulated by eight states under the Convention

This Essay explores the sanction of “non-participation,” which has been used against Russia following the start of the war in Ukraine. After mapping out the multifaceted instances of Russia's exclusion from international organizations, the analysis considers the legality of measures adopted that do not have an explicit basis in institutional rules. The Essay concludes with broad reflections on the

As global crises become more frequent, international organizations increasingly invoke emergency powers to address them. But the study of international organization emergency governance remains in its infancy. We consider the EU response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The EU built on the emergency to accelerate EU integration and introduce unprecedented reforms in defense and security, migration

The crime of aggression requires that the perpetrator be in a position effectively to exercise control over—or to direct—the political or military action of a state. This requirement, called the “leadership clause,” has led to the view that private individuals are excluded from criminal responsibility because they lack the necessary authority over the state policy. In this Essay, I argue against this

Since about 2008, the rise of autocracy and the decline of democracy has threatened the modern liberal international order. To counter the threat of authoritarian international law, the United States should collaborate with liberal democracies from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America to develop new plurilateral institutions and treaties to create a “liberal plurilateral order.” This Essay shows

Russia's aggression against Ukraine has brought into focus the growing significance of open-source information for international legal processes. Enabled by novel digital technologies, civil society actors have seized the opportunity provided by the vast amount of publicly available evidence to counter-narrate Russia's pretexts to justify its invasion within the deliberative bodies of the United Nations

For all the attention paid to the panelists and Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Secretariat plays an overlooked and increasingly important role in the dispute settlement mechanism (DSM), including in selecting panelists, writing “issue papers” for adjudicators, providing economic expert advice, participating in internal deliberations, and drafting actual rulings. This Article

Having recently emerged from its unenviable status as the runt of international law, the phenomenon of statelessness nonetheless eludes traditional international legal instruments. Confronted with questions of nationality that typically fall within the domain of sovereignty, international and regional human rights bodies struggle to rein in the increasingly creative measures that states adopt to obscure

This Article analyzes long-standing disagreements over dissent's effect on judicial legitimacy, independence, and legal doctrine by undertaking the first comparative study of dissent practices across three leading tribunals, the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the European Court of Justice. Surprisingly, we find that each of the central claims in debates over

pluralism ignores conflicts of laws as a discipline, which is a problem, in his view, as the former lacks the precision of the latter.48 Whether or not the reader is persuaded by Michaels’s arguments, his chapter makes the underlying challenge faced by global legal pluralism of herding cats of many stripes into one cohesive and inclusive conversation. Despite (or perhaps because of) the abundant challenges

jects are likely to prevent such transformation; they operate as brinkmanship to safeguard that whatever happens with the global ecosystem will not lead to the loss of control over resources by those in governing positions. No doubt, technological innovations are positive. No doubt, soft norms and accountability proceedings will alleviate the most immediate problems, perhaps even for a long time. In

specialized, or extraterritorial issues in areas such as maritime law, but they are unlikely to be so receptive when it comes to more run-ofthe-mill issues, especially when the international law at issue is customary rather than treaty-based. As a result, international law’s success in expanding to increasing corners of lawmay have contributed to the reluctance of U.S. courts to link international

This Article theorizes “security” as a site of continuing struggle in the international system between competing approaches to identifying and responding to urgent threats. Rather than endorsing a single approach, this Article argues that a claim to “security” can imply any one of four approaches to law and policy, each of which has radically divergent implications for who is empowered by a security

The International Law Commission (ILC) held its seventy-second session from April 26 to June 4 and from July 5 to August 6, 2021 in Geneva, under the chairmanship of Mahmoud Hmoud (Jordan). This session was originally scheduled for the summer of 2020, but had to be postponed due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic continued in 2021 to present health risks and travel difficulties

On March 5, 2020, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) decided to authorize the prosecutor to commence a proprio motu investigation into the alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Afghanistan War since 2003. This decision is the first case where the requirements for the authorization of an investigation under Article 15(4) of the ICC Rome Statute

On June 17, 2021, the United States Supreme Court reversed and remanded a suit filed against Nestlé USA and Cargill under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) for lack of jurisdiction. This case has already garnered attention over the nature of the dispute (child slaves in Africa), the Supreme Court's treatment of jurisdiction under the ATS, and the finding shared by five of the nine Supreme Court justices

On October 6, 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its judgment in Commission v. Hungary. It found that Hungary had violated the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), as well as internal European Union law—specifically the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU Charter). The case arose out of Hungary's 2017 amendment to its higher education law. The amendment imposed