This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a Book Symposium on Interpretation in International Law. The Symposium was introduced by Daniel Peat and Matthew Windsor who offered the framework and context of the book in describing their introductory chapter (available here), explaining that the idea of interpretation in their work centers around the metaphor of a game, with each of the authors...
[Philip Allott is Emeritus Professor of International Public Law at the University of Cambridge.] Interpretation of any text – religious, political, historical, scientific, literary, artistic, legal – raises profound philosophical problems. Interpretation of a legal text is in a class of its own, because it can have direct and substantial social effects, determining people’s lives. The philosophy of legal interpretation is...
[Fuad Zarbiyev is an Associate in the International Arbitration Group of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP.] The interpretation discourse in modern international law is dominated by a textualist paradigm. This claim may seem empirically wrong if it is taken to mean that nothing other than eo nomine textual arguments features in the international legal discourse. After all, the interpretive regime...
[John Louth is Editor-in-Chief of Academic Law at Oxford University Press.] I make it 401, but more of that below. A few years ago when we carried out some research into law scholars’ habits we found many were telling us that there was so much being published that they didn’t even try to keep up anymore. I decided to try and see...
[Julian Arato is an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School.] Interpretation in International Law is something of an iconoclastic volume, from its critical ethos to its provocative structure around the metaphor of the game. The object of its revisionism, above all, is an apparently stagnant formalism that seems too prevalent in the theory and practice of interpretation in international law today. Symbolic...
Newsweek published a long article today about a petition organized by NYU students, alumni, and non-law faculty claiming that it would be "unacceptable" for Harold Koh to teach international human-rights law at the law school. Here is a snippet: While working for the Obama administration, Koh was the most public legal defender of the president’s drone strike program. Last month, a...
Negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have highlighted the growing debate over investment arbitration. Last week the New York Times published an article summarizing objections to the TPP investment chapter. The article notes that politicians, law professors and liberal activists “have expressed fears the provisions would infringe on United States...
[Gabor Rona is a Visiting Professor of Law and Director, Law and Armed Conflict Project at Cardozo Law School.] The 9th Circuit issued a revised Opinion on March 27th in Maldonado v. Holder, a case about non-refoulement (the obligation not to expel, return or extradite someone to a country where they would be in danger of being tortured) and deferral...
[Michael Waibel is a University Lecturer in Law at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law.] The rise of distinct interpretive communities goes hand in hand with the much debated topic of fragmentation in international law. Even though the VCLT’s role in treaty interpretation has been studied extensively, how interpretive communities affect treaty interpretation...
I want to start off our conversation about the larger project Bianchi, Peat and Windsor have undertaken with their new book before introducing my own contribution to it. For years, the concept of interpretation has had a fairly narrow focus within the international legal landscape. It has almost uniformly been associated with a discrete set of objects -- treaties. From Grotius...
[Daniel Peat and Matthew Windsor are PhD candidates at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, and members of Gonville and Caius College.] International lawyers have long realised the importance of interpretation to their academic discipline and professional practice. Interpretation in international law has traditionally been understood as a process of assigning meaning to texts with the objective of establishing rights...
Nearly everyone treats Palestine's membership in the ICC as a done deal; after all, the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) has accepted Palestine's accession to the Rome Statute and the OTP has publicly stated that "since Palestine was granted observer State status in the UN by the UNGA, it must be considered a 'State' for the purposes of accession." But neither the...
