April 2014

Weekly News Wrap: Monday, April 7, 2014

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa French and African soldiers serving in Central African Republic are "overwhelmed" by the "state of anarchy" in the country, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said a day after Chadian troops began withdrawing from the peacekeeping mission.  Nigeria has overtaken South Africa as Africa's largest economy after a rebasing calculation...

Events and announcements: April 6, 2014

Event The United Nations Law Committee of the International Law Association, American Branch, along with The George Washington University Law School, invite you to a brownbag lunch panel on Treaty Survival on Wednesday, April 9, 2014, 1:00 – 2:15 PM in the Moot Court Room, The George Washington University Law School, 2000 H St. NW, Washington DC, 20052. This panel will address the effectiveness of treaties over time, with...

Weekend Roundup: March 29-April 4, 2014

This week on Opinio Juris, Julian wondered if the ICJ's judgment in the Whaling in the Antarctic would ring in the end of the Whale Wars. He also curiously awaits the release of the Philippines memorial filed with the PCA in the UNCLOS arbitration against China and assessed China's reaction to the submission. Meanwhile, Kevin handed out advice on how to get yourself convicted of...

HILJ Online Symposium: Suzanne Katzenstein Responds to Karen J. Alter

[Suzanne Katzenstein is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Duke University School of Law.] This post is part of the HILJ Online Symposium: Volumes 54(2) & 55(1). Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Thank you to Opinio Juris and the Harvard Journal of International Law for hosting this exchange and to Karen Alter for her thoughtful comments. My article’s central question is why governments create global international courts or, put more precisely, why some government attempts to create such courts succeed and other attempts fail. I evaluate all attempts at international courts that I could identify that reached the multilateral treaty negotiation or treaty drafting stage. This amounted to four successful and seven failed attempts at establishing courts invested with general jurisdiction or relating to international criminal law, the law of the sea, and human rights. The dominant explanation for the creation of international courts focuses on the functional incentives of governments, such as the need to overcome collective action problems or to signal credibility. I argue that the functional explanation provides insufficient insight into the successes and failures of the proposals I study. I evaluate two additional explanations. The first focuses on the preferences of the most powerful states, the UK and the US. I propose a second that emphasizes the role of legal crises and international lawyers. During periods of legal crisis, governments are more willing to cooperate with one another in order to bring stability back to the legal and political order; and they are also more receptive to the proposals for international courts made by international lawyers. Neither the power nor the crisis argument fully explains the eleven attempts analyzed in the article. Not surprisingly, history is too complex. But taken together, the two explanations provide substantial insight into ten of the eleven cases, and into the creation of international courts across the 20th century. Alter rightly notes that I define international courts and tribunals narrowly—as only those institutions that are open to any state to join. This means I exclude both regional and ad hoc criminal tribunals. I do so not only for the sake of feasibility but also because I assume that state concerns about protecting their sovereignty are distinct in those contexts. States, for instance, retain more control over the design and operation of regional than they do of fully international courts (for example in the area of judicial appointments), and most state officials are not subjected to the jurisdiction of the ad hoc criminal tribunals they help create. In addition, current scholarship, including Alter’s own work, persuasively shows that the creation of regional courts has been influenced both by region-specific dynamics as well as cross-regional emulation. I make three other important definitional and scope choices. I study only those proposals that reach the multilateral treaty drafting or treaty negotiation stage. These attempts seemed to have a real chance at succeeding. I define “success” as courts with treaties that actually entered into force. Finally, I also exclude tribunals that deal solely with economic disputes, such as trade and investment disputes. Here, my assumption is that powerful states—those with the largest markets—enjoy unique bargaining leverage during negotiations.

HILJ Online Symposium: Hague Peace Conference Courts v. The Universe of International Courts

[Karen J. Alter is a Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University. Alter’s most recent book is The New Terrain of International Law: Courts, Politics, Rights (Princeton University Press, 2014).] This post is part of the HILJ Online Symposium: Volumes 54(2) & 55(1). Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Suzanne Katzenstein’s article is a very welcome systematic investigation of the Hague era and post-Cold War proposals to generate international courts ("ICs"). Katzenstein puts her finger on a serious problem in the literature on international courts. Scholars are biased towards success, since it is hard to build a career by focusing on what does not exist for most to see. Katzenstein is correct in pointing out the limitations of our scholarly biases. Indeed the only way to understand what leads to IC creation is to give equal weight to both successful and unsuccessful efforts. Researching abandoned initiatives, however, is not so easy to do. One can find references to publicly voiced ideas and formed proposals that fail, but these references tend to be brief and anecdotal. Moreover, many ideas are voiced but then abandoned, leaving not even a paper trail. The dearth of deep secondary literatures regarding failed initiatives makes it is extremely hard to construct a universe of cases, let alone develop and test arguments that might explain why some proposals are abandoned. During what I call the Hague Peace Talk era, however, proponents developed a grand vision for a network of international courts. Katzenstein thus has a period of time in which she can investigate abandoned and successful endeavors, side by side. She then traces what happened to these initiatives over time. Her analysis deftly summarizes this landscape of successful and failed global initiatives across the twentieth century. I especially appreciate this article’s many tables that really help us see patterns as well as what became of various proposals.

HILJ Online Symposium: The Next Step

[Michael Waterstone is the Associate Dean for Research and Academic Centers and J. Howard Ziemann Fellow and Professor of Law at Loyola Law School Los Angeles.] This post is part of the HILJ Online Symposium: Volumes 54(2) & 55(1). Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I am grateful that the Harvard International Law Journal and Opinio Juris have asked me to write a response to The Democratic Life of the Union: Toward Equal Voting Participation for Europeans with Disabilities, written by Janos Fiala-Butora, Michael Stein, and Janet Lord. This Article seeks to put forward “preliminary legal scholarship on equal political participation by persons with disabilities and what international human rights law requires for its attainment.” Given their various experiences as academics, international human rights lawyers, and academics, the authors are certainly well suited to this task (and I should note that two of the three are former co-authors and friends). As I see it, this Article makes three significant points: (1) it describes Kiss, a European Court of Human Rights decision holding that Hungary had unjustly and indiscriminately taken voting rights away from someone solely by nature of his being placed under guardianship, and critiques the decision for offering limited standards for what type of individualized inquiry is required to restrict the franchise; (2) argues that under international law, states should not be able to disenfranchise persons on the basis of disability, even in the case where individual assessments are made; and (3) challenges Martha Nussbaum’s suggestion that states should authorize guardians to vote on behalf of individuals who are neither able to form a view on political issues for themselves nor communicate their choices to others (the authors would not have a guardian exercise decisionmaking, meaning that those who cannot vote – properly construed, a small number - do not vote). There is a lot here, worthy of a response. In this post, I will primarily address the Article’s second point. Most other rights, as the authors explain, are derivative of voting, because participation in the political process is “one of the key avenues through which marginalized groups most effectively seek equality.” Thus, what law – whether domestic or international – has to say about voting is crucial (or in the language of American constitutional law, fundamental). The Article suggests that the disenfranchisement of people with disabilities generally, and people under guardianship specifically, is a failure of law. This is no doubt correct, but I would like to suggest incomplete. Law is an important step in the process, but only a first step. The history of people with disabilities being excluded from the political process demonstrates that full inclusion (something not fully and effectively realized in any state of which I am aware) requires culture change and vigorous efforts by advocates and lawyers to implement whatever changes are able to be made under the formal scriptures of law. In that sense, this Article offers an important and cogent narrative on what the law should be. I want to suggest that future work should move forward to discuss the hard work of implementing that law.

HILJ Online Symposium: Greg Shill Responds to Christopher Whytock

[Greg Shill is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.] This post is part of the HILJ Online Symposium: Volumes 54(2) & 55(1). Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below.

I thank Professor Christopher Whytock for engaging with the ideas in my article, Ending Judgment Arbitrage: Jurisdictional Competition and the Enforcement of Foreign Money Judgments in the United States, 54 Harv. Int'l L.J. 459 (2013), and the Harvard International Law Journal and Opinio Juris for hosting this symposium. Whytock has published widely on transnational litigation and judgment enforcement. Ultimately, I think his response misreads or overstates the article’s claims in some places (and in others we may simply have a difference of opinion), but the sister-state dimension of transnational judgment enforcement has thus far not attracted much scholarly attention and I am delighted to see his thoughtful and serious commentary in this forum.

I. Judgment Arbitrage & Whytock’s Criticisms Briefly, the article focuses on the enforcement of foreign-country judgments in the United States. By its nature, this process creates the potential for clashes between domestic and foreign legal systems. In a typical case, a local court, often in the U.S., is asked to order a local defendant to satisfy a judgment rendered by a foreign court, under foreign law. Thus, unsurprisingly, scholars to date have tended to focus on the conflict between foreign sources of law and systems of justice on the one hand and their American counterparts on the other—the international-level conflict. One mission of the article is to explore domestic—i.e., sister-state—conflicts that result from the judgment-enforcement process. To collect on a foreign judgment in the U.S., a plaintiff must first domesticate it. This entails a two-stage process: the judgment must first be recognized and then enforced. Federalism and the Erie doctrine are key to this process: (1) recognition is governed by state law, specifically forum law, (2) recognition standards differ widely from state to state, and (3) states have an obligation to enforce one another’s judgments. Thus, I argue, plaintiffs can exploit sister state differences in recognition law by first obtaining recognition in a state that is receptive to foreign judgments and then enforcing in a state that might not have recognized the foreign judgment in the first place. My article gives this phenomenon the name “judgment arbitrage,” and closes by proposing a federal statute to address it. The upshot of the statute is to allow states to resist judgment arbitrage by declining to enforce judgments they would not have recognized in the first place.