Search: Syria Insta-Symposium

This week, we are hosting a symposium on Defining the International Rule of Law: Defying Gravity?, (free access for six months) the latest article from Robert McCorquodale, the Director of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, Professor of International Law and Human Rights, University of Nottingham, and Barrister, Brick Court Chambers, London. The article was recently published in the International and Comparative Law Quarterly. The article’s abstract: This article aims to offer a definition of the international rule of law. It does this through clarifying the core objectives...

[Richard Gardiner is a Visiting Professor at University College London, Faculty of Laws] The article which this symposium addresses is important, timely, and elegant. It is an important study because it examines one of the most common misunderstandings about the VCLT provisions on the role of preparatory work in treaty interpretation. It lays to rest the mistaken idea that an interpreter may only consider preparatory work if interpretation of a treaty provision by applying the general rule reveals ambiguity or obscurity, or leads to a result which is manifestly absurd...

[Darryl Robinson is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Much has been written about command responsibility. In my article, I argue that views on the nature of command responsibility have become unnecessarily obscure and convoluted, and that the problem flows from an early misstep in the jurisprudence. If we revisit the first misstep, a simple and elegant solution is available. Famously, early Tribunal jurisprudence concluded...

...32 of the VCLT guide interpreters to discovering the common intention of treaty parties. Thus, ordinary meaning, context, preparatory work, and other means of interpretation help interpreters understand the legally correct meaning of a treaty. A detailed analysis of the preparatory work of the Vienna Convention is an appropriate method for a scholarly analysis of the legally correct meaning of Articles 31 and 32 of the VCLT. As I will explain in my two posts for this Symposium, I think all three of Julian’s assumptions are either fundamentally flawed or...

In response to the online symposium on LGBT asylum and refugee law held two weeks ago by the NYU Journal of International Law & Politics and Opinio Juris, the Journal received several additional pieces of commentary. The contributions below specifically tie to Professor Ryan Goodman’s article, Asylum and the Concealment of Sexual Orientation, which also appears in issue 44:2: “To counteract some of these concerns, [Hathaway & Pobjoy] place great faith in international human rights and anti-discrimination law pertaining to LGBT rights to constrain decision-makers’ reliance on their own subjectimve...

[Tim Meyer is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Georgia 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. Monica Hakimi’s Unfriendly Unilateralism is a very welcome addition to the growing body of literature on international lawmaking. Hakimi’s basic claim is that states often act unilaterally in ways that prompt changes to international law. She defines unilateral action as that which takes place outside the confines of...

...forward in a positive account of NGOs in governance. Indeed, in some respects it was quietly the most audacious of the papers at the seminar, because Steve set out the form of an argument for asking how anyone could propose to leave the NGOs out. I will very much look forward to reading the essay when published in the symposium issue. At the broadest and most abstract level, I found that the crucial legitimacy issue was leading, as Weber said that it must, to questions of society and not just...

We are pleased to introduce to you today an online symposium discussing Hastings Law Professor Chimène Keitner‘s article, Rights Beyond Borders, published in the Yale Journal of International Law. Her interlocutors will be Marko Milanovic of the University of Nottingham and Pierre-Hugues Verdier of Virginia Law School....

[Beth Van Schaack is the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at the Law School and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Security & Cooperation at Stanford University. Please don’t miss Patryk I. Labuda’s symposium post at Justice in Conflict.] The relationship between the United States and the ICC has been characterized by change more than continuity. Over the years, and across U.S. presidential administrations, these interactions have vacillated between a wary arms-length posture to constructive support and cooperation to overt hostility (see the ABA’s timeline here)....

...which the trusteeship concept is reflected in state and judicial practice, to understand the deviating judgments (like the Pulp Mills judgment rightly referred to by Klabbers), to contextualize the argument historically and theoretically, and to explore (and suggest responses to) its possible negative aspects. But in order to do all that, a conceptual framing was necessary, which is what the article sought to provide. I thank the editors for hosting the symposium and the commentators for their enlightening remarks and criticisms, and I look forward to many more fruitful exchanges....

[Rob McLaughlin is a Professor of Military Security Law and Director of the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society at UNSW Canberra.This post is part of our New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace Symposium .] As Bill Boothby has observed in New Technologies and the Law in War and Peace, ‘It is…difficult to determine what the future seems likely to look like in terms of further technological evolution and in terms of changes in regulations and other legal and policy provision to address...

[Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School and the author of Globalizing Transitional Justice (OUP paper2015).] I have learned a great deal from the thoughtful responses to my article (.pdf) by the participants in this symposium. Dinah PoKempner is correct to say that my article doesn’t address the merits of a “right of accountability” as such but rather looks to how the move to judicialization and application of human rights law interacts with political and other domestic processes of transition. She speculates...