Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
11 Oct Rethinking International Law After Gaza Symposium: Trade, Resistance and International Law – Responding to Atrocities
left to ask whether the law has anything to offer or if it is complicit in furthering violence and depravation. Does international economic law govern this paradoxical relationship between trade and peace in cases of atrocities? At first glance, one can casually conclude that the law does not seem to enable or oblige the subject of international law to explicitly denounce violent repressive regimes that commit genocidal actions. The Israeli violence in Gaza continues and has spilled over to other territories recently, especially Lebanon but also Yemen. But from a...
05 Aug Emerging Voices: Methodological Individualism
[Dr. Tamar Megiddo is a Research Fellow at the TraffLab Research Project at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law.] To suggest in 2019 that international law scholarship remains statist may immediately lift some eyebrows. Although international law scholarship had traditionally embraced a state-centric approach, many have assumed that the field has long left statism behind. In my article Methodological Individualism, forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal, I challenge this assumption. I argue that although mainstream international law scholarship may no longer embrace ontological statism, according to which states are the sole,...06 Jun AALS International Law Section Call for Papers
American courts apply international law to facts, they do so as common law courts. Might this explain why Americans sometimes come to different conclusions about what international law requires than do their foreign counterparts? Coupled with the ASIL Annual Meeting topic next year of International Law as Law, I know that there is some significant consternation by international law scholars about these emphases in the United States on a question of international law as law as opposed to the issue of enforcement and compliance with international law. Especially after so...08 Jul Emerging Voices: A View from Early Modern Cultural Studies on Fragmentation and the Law of Nations
Koskenniemi explains, can now be “narrate[d] as part of a different set of human pursuits, values, and priorities,” including trade law, transport law, environmental law, law of the sea, or human rights. Koskenniemi’s account of jurisdictional and normative fragmentation usefully captures two main insights, first, that narrative—story—plays a critical and maybe increasing role on what is notably called the “international stage”; and secondly, that the stories we tell and the ways that we tell them have legal, social, economic, and political consequences. Robert Cover’s foundational essay “Nomos and Narrative” (pdf)...
19 May Symposium on Systemic Racism and Sexism in Legal Academia: Racial Hierarchies and the Internationalization of Southern Law Schools
[Roy is a faculty member at Jindal Global Law School in India. Roy has published under a pseudonym so that they may remain anonymous.] International law school rankings are dominated by institutions in Europe, North America and Australia. As an indication, the previous editions of the Times Higher Education and QS rankings included just one and two law schools from outside these regions in their top 20 worldwide. Law schools in the Global South have become increasingly conscious of their relegation in rankings and the implications this has for their...
17 Jun Contingency in International Law Symposium: Contingency Between and Beyond–The Prepositional Life of International Law
lawyers who want to move beyond recovering contingency through historical narratives. I have found her call to explore non-evental aspects of international law helpful in rethinking a talk I gave on “Revolutionary Contingency in International Law: Thomas Sankara, Assassination, & Necropolitics”. Conclusion International law has a grammar, one which can be read and pulled apart in different and revealing ways. I hope that by highlighting the “prepositional thinking” structuring understandings of contingency in international law – namely the “between” and “beyond” approaches – my engagement with parts of this ground‑breaking...
13 Aug Counseling the Prince: Reflections on the Art of Advising the State on International Law
the rule of law and respect for the interests of justice,” by presenting honest and accurate advice on the international legal rights and obligations of the state, by promoting international law through encouraging the state to comply with international law, and by protecting international law through preserving and developing its role in international relations. The Illusory Community: My principal concern with Harry Aitken’s proposal is that it is sociologically flawed. The institutional duties of domestic lawyers are not merely obligations codified in areas of law such as ethics and professional...
17 Mar International Law for a Fragile World: Ecological Risk and the Limits of Consent-Based Governance
[Dr Sergey Sayapin is Professor of Law at KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan) and Distinguished Visiting Global Scholar at the NUS Centre for International Law (2025)] Climate change has long been framed as a problem of the future – a looming catastrophe that international law was expected to prevent before it arrived. That framing is now increasingly untenable. Climate collapse is no longer a hypothetical threat awaiting legal intervention – it is an ongoing, cumulative process whose most serious consequences are already unfolding. Rising sea levels, extreme heat, biodiversity loss, and...
07 Jan Welcome Back to the Rule of Guns and Lawyers: A Tale of Two Ursulas, From Ukraine to Venezuela
[Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Chair of International Law at Tilburg University, and Senior Faculty at the Institute for Global Law and Policy of Harvard Law School (nikolasrajkovic.com). His research examines how international law is being reshaped by geopolitical, infrastructural, digital, and ecological transformations, drawing on interdisciplinary work across international law, international relations, and critical geography. He is the author of Off the Map: A Critical Geography of International Law (forthcoming CUP, 2026) and co-editor of The Power of Legality (CUP, 2016).] In February 2022, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine,...09 May The ACLU Needs to Dial Down the Rhetoric!
facie evidence of those crimes, including, but not limited to, unlawful detention, inhumane and degrading treatment, extra-judicial punishments, denial of lawful due process, unlawful coercive interrogations, unlawful deportations, and trials before unlawfully constituted tribunals. (c) That the only purpose of the Respondents and counsel for Respondents in these cases is to deny the Petitioners / Plaintiffs their lawful rights and due process, which constitutes an offense pursuant to 18 USC 2441(c)(2) per HR art. 23(h). (d) That in addition to the Respondents named herein, Richard Cheney, the Vice President of...