In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Public International Law

02 Aug

[Clare Brown is an Australian lawyer and Deputy Director of Victim Advocates International, based in Beirut.] On 28 July, CNN published an expose detailing the abuse of numerous Kenyan women by the Kenyan Consulate in Beirut, Lebanon. The women alleged that the Consulate had stolen money from them, physically assaulted them, and attempted to coerce them to perform sex work. The accusations, though alarming, are not...

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29 Jul

[Craig D. Gaver has practiced law in Washington, DC and the Arabian/Persian Gulf. He recently received the LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School. The views expressed herein are solely his own.] Civil aviation lies at the center of the Gulf dispute. Upon the break in relations on 5 June 2017, Saudi Arabia closed Qatar’s only land border (and later threatened to...

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29 Jul

[Bruno Gelinas-Faucher is a PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Université de Montréal. His research focuses on the content and implementation of State Responsibility towards non-state actors.] On 29 June, the UN Secretary-General officially launched the election season at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by announcing the candidates running to fill the next vacancies in 2021....

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24 Jul

[Rachel López is an associate professor of law at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar and fellow at the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School.] Gravity is a concept that is frequently invoked in international spaces,...

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24 Jul

[Tasha Manoranjan, Esq. is the Executive Director of People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) and a Senior Policy Advisor at the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The views expressed here are PEARL's and do not represent the Commission's. Meruba Sivaselvachandran is a rising second-year student in the JD/MBA program at University of Toronto and a Legal Intern at PEARL.] Introduction The...

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17 Jul

[Tamsin Phillipa Paige is a Lecturer with Deakin Law School and consults for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in relation to Maritime Crime.]  [Recently Opinio Juris hosted a symposium on Professor Monica Hakimi’s latest article in the Michigan Law Review, “Making Sense of Customary International Law”, and her argument that the rulebook approach isn’t reflective of how CIL functions, and...

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09 Jul

06.07.20 | 0 Comments| Edit [Monica Hakimi is the James V. Campbell Professor of Law at Michigan Law School.] Preview of Monica's reply to critics https://t.co/5IAtPghkyA pic.twitter.com/db4Mr9S7yN— Adil Haque (@AdHaque110) July 6, 2020 Thanks again to all the contributors to this symposium. It’s hugely rewarding to have such an extraordinary group of international lawyers and scholars engage with my work. It’s all the more rewarding...

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09 Jul

I truly enjoyed reading Monica Hakimi’s “Making Sense of Customary International Law” (CIL). It is an exceptional paper, where Monica elegantly brings the entire concept of CIL back to the drawing board. The argument, I believe, can only be properly understood if the reader takes a few steps back and accepts that international law is a construct built by the assembling and disassembling of different legal...

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08 Jul

[Jean d’Aspremont is the Chair in Public International Law at the University of Manchester.] That international lawyers constantly feel a need to revisit their doctrinal fundamentals is no sign that the international legal discipline is running out of steam (and out of inspiration). Even if international lawyers feel the world is crumbling in front of them and demanding urgent interventions, there...

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08 Jul

[Martin Scheinin is a Professor of International Law and Human Rights at European University Institute and a former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism.] Professor Monica Hakimi’s article ’Making sense of customary international law’ is both rewarding and thought-provoking. It fully merits this Symposium. She makes a convincing case that most if not all mainstream doctrinal writing on the topic has serious flaws. She rightly criticizes...

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07 Jul

[Jutta Brunnée is University Professor and Metcalf Chair in Environmental Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto.] With her provocative new article Making Sense of Customary Law, Monica Hakimi challenges doctrinalists as well as theorists of international law to engage in a sophisticated conversation about a classical problem: how do we know when customary international law (CIL) exists as “a general practice...

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07 Jul

Introduction Monica Hakimi’s new article, “Making Sense of Customary International Law,” is my favourite kind of scholarship: bold, critical, revisionist, tendentious. Too few scholars are brave enough to confront the sacred cows of public international law this forthrightly, and for that reason alone Hakimi deserves our thanks and praise. That said, I disagree with nearly every word in Hakimi’s article. An adequate response would require an article of its...

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