Search: crossing lines
17 Dec China invokes UNCLOS in claiming sovereignty over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands
...hawkish in responding to such measures. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that China’s now also beginning to push its case legally, invoking UNCLOS’s provisions on delineating continental shelf rights beyond its 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone. Specifically, UNCLOS Article 76 provides in paragraphs 7-9: 7. The coastal State shall delineate the outer limits of its continental shelf, where that shelf extends beyond 200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured, by straight lines not exceeding 60 nautical miles in length, connecting...
16 Apr Symposium on Confronting Colonial Objects: International Law as Colonial Object – The Language/Materiality Dichotomy and the Coloniality of Cultural Takings
...organize the world along lines of social or racial inclusion and exclusion and to legitimize and domination and suppression” and (2) that they were “more pluralist at the time than admitted”, thus challenging the argument that “takings occurred in a legal vacuum”. There is a solid methodological reason for this dual role understanding, as it allows Stahn to avoid the inter-temporal problem: the idea that legal phenomena should be studied under the law as it existed at the time of their occurrence, not the time of their evaluation. This means...
18 Mar ENMOD: Dodo, Dormant or Presciently Divine?
...is a 1977 convention that prohibits its contracting parties from engaging in “military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party” (Article I). It is the treaty at the source of Principle 17 of the UN International Law Commission’s Principles on the Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflict, and Rule 3.B of the ICRC Guidelines on the Protection of the Natural Environment in Armed Conflict. The International...21 Jul A Few Thoughts on Immigration Reform (R.I.P.)
The chance for major immigration reform during this session of Congress has apparently passed, according to this Reuters item here and an editorial in yesterday’s Times. Although I teach and write in immigration law, I have found this year’s high-profile debate on the subject pretty unedifying. This is in part because it has been mostly about politics rather than law. The politics may be unpredictable, with positions that cut deeply across party lines, but they are also enveloped in unreality – the unreality of controlling immigration. As Tamar Jacoby (a...29 Mar Symposium: Cogan Reply to Pauwelyn
...forms of noncompliance that may be beneficial, but I do not consider them at length. Professor Pauwelyn first claims that I go “too far by underestimating the flexibilities and exit options that exist within the system of international law.” What I describe as noncompliance, he sees as “flexibilities and exit options perfectly permitted and accepted within international law.” I wish more people thought along those lines, and I wish it were that international law were more like what Professor Pauwelyn describes. Unfortunately, international law and international legal scholars appear to...04 Jun So What Is the Legacy of Tiananmen, Twenty Years On?
...to say, as a pro bono gift of Sullivan & Cromwell. Tiananmen took place while all of us were there; it was discussed at length, but the conference declined to make a joint statement, if I recall correctly. I think that was the right decision – no one at the meeting was authorized to speak on behalf of their organizations, to start with. Somewhat more disturbing was that not everyone at the conference appeared to think that the Chinese protestors had a defensible cause. The fault lines of the human...
08 Aug Ecocide and Article 2(4): Envisioning Environmental Aggression as “Use of Force”
...“use of force” under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and the need to interpret it in tandem with recent ecological violations. Although, there is a dearth of scholarship arguing on similar lines, the imminency of the issue cannot be over-emphasised. The need for a robust framework including state liability in cases of ecocide is imperative, otherwise the biggest perpetrators of ecological destruction i.e. nation states will go unpunished. As the climate crisis deepens and states continue to deploy environmental destruction as a weapon of war, the existing legal architecture,...05 Mar Lozano v. Montoya Alvarez: The Latest Supreme Court Treaty Interpretation Case
...Korean Air Lines Co., 516 U. S. 217, 226 (1996). Lozano has not identified a background principle of equitable tolling that is shared by the signatories to the Hague Convention. To the contrary, Lozano concedes that in the context of the Convention, “foreign courts have failed to adopt equitable tolling . . . because they lac[k] the presumption that we [have].” Tr. of Oral Arg. 19–20. While no signatory state’s court of last resort has resolved the question, intermediate courts of appeals in several states have rejected equitable tolling…. I...05 Jan Firm Whites and Runny Yolks in WTO Law
[Tomer Broude is a Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law and Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the following post continues our conversation on Shaffer and Pollack’s When Cooperation Fails] Mark Pollack and Greg Shaffer well deserve the praise that the previous commentators have given them for their study of the transatlantic law and politics of GMOs, “When Cooperation Fails”. Empirically, the book is a model of qualitative research, in some parts following the lines of Greg’s superb Defending Interests. The theoretical dimensions of the book masterfully...
13 Feb When War Bets on Protest: Iran’s Civilians in a Double Bind
...warned that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters,” the United States would “come to their rescue,” declaring the U.S. “locked and loaded.” Days later he urged demonstrators to “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS” and promised that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” while describing a reinforced posture and, later, a “massive armada” headed toward Iran, ready to act “with speed and violence, if necessary.” Those lines are not just rhetoric. They sketch a theory of change: external force creates openings; civilians convert disruption into political rupture. Public reporting has...