Search: crossing lines
25 Oct What Black Widow Can Teach Us About Human Trafficking Law
[Samantha Franks is an associate at a law firm in Washington D.C., where she specializes in international trade. She is a former Frederick Douglass Fellow, a former Fulbright postgraduate scholar, and a current member of the Department of Health and Human Services Office on Trafficking in Person’s working group.] For many fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the 2021 release of Black Widow felt like a breath of fresh air. After twelve years on the sidelines, the film finally gave the first female Avenger, portrayed by Scarlett Johansson, a story of her...10 Jun Pride 2020: a time for vigilance, collective action and digital spaces in the COVID-19 pandemic
...inequalities and fault-lines within society. As the world slowly returns to a not-so-normal new normal, social, financial assistance and access to safe, secure homes and the right to housing for LGBTQ persons will remain illusive. Without protection from discriminatory application of laws, lockdown and COVID-19 related measures, LGBTQ persons will continue to be disproportionately targeted by police in the application of new emergency criminal law. The increase in executive control shifts state power towards authoritarianism in many places and this does not auger well for human rights protections that we...
11 Jul The Rise of the Global Legal Order
...global economy, the formerly developing states were forced to refinance their loans. With commercial loans unavailable, they were driven into the arms of the IMF. New loans were offered, but they came with conditions beyond mere repayment. These new “loan conditionalities” demanded macroeconomic restructuring along neoliberal lines. Not coincidentally, the IMF and World Bank were each purged of their Keynesian economists over the course of the 1970s. The new conditionalities insisted that the formerly developing states reverse the policies that had brought them a brief period of actual development. The...
28 May Futureproofing Human Rights Symposium: Human Rights in the Era of Blockchain – A Polycentric Accountability Framework
...acknowledges that decentralized digital systems cannot be effectively governed through top-down state intervention or private self-regulation alone. Embedding Human Rights in Decentralized Governance If blockchain governance requires new institutional models to ensure accountability, the same holds true for human rights. Historically, human rights law was designed to hold centralized entities—primarily states—accountable for violations against individuals. But blockchain challenges this premise: it disperses authority, embeds decisions in code, and blurs the lines of legal responsibility. In this context, human rights protection must also evolve to operate within polycentric systems. Just as...03 May How Should the OBL Operation be Characterized?
...and Kooijmans recognized that in a post-9/11 world containing failed states, state practice strongly supports the view that an expansive reading of Article 51 to include non-state actors is appropriate. Sunday’s operation was another example of state practice undertaken with the belief that the boundaries of the battlefield are not determined by geopolitical lines but rather by the location of participants in an armed conflict, whether the participants are states or non-state actors. This continues to be the standard for determining where the law of armed conflict is properly applied....02 Jun Law of the Sea Treaty Ratified! (By the Interior Department)
...the new lines is none other than the Law of the Sea Treaty, which, as the paper points out, the U.S. has thus far refused to ratify. Actually, this is not as crazy as the Times believes. The U.S. has signed the treaty after all, and it has also recognized many of its provisions as customary international law. U.S. courts apply customary international law all the time in resolving territorial disputes between states, so it seems fine if an executive agency (which otherwise has that authority) wants to use the...08 Jan Liberia’s TRC Begins Work
The beginning of Charles Taylor’s trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone is obviously big news, and those who are interested in the trial should check out the live-blogging and analysis here. But Taylor’s trial should not overshadow an equally important event related to the civil war in Liberia — the launch of Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The commission was established along similar lines to South Africa’s post-apartheid body. Since 2003, Liberia has inched forward, helped by the presence of thousands of peacekeeping troops. The conflict saw the...26 Oct Book Roundtable: Ruti Teitel’s Humanity’s Law
I’m delighted to have been asked to participate in this discussion of Ruti Teitel’s Humanity’s Law. Let me start by simply saying what a great read this book is. Congratulations to Ruti on a book that really does shift our thinking about the base lines of international law, challenge conventional notions of a state-centric international legal system, and help make sense of the changes across a range of sub-fields in international law that all do more to privilege the individual. Ruti’s central claim is that there has been a move...
21 Jun The Inadequacy of the US State Department Report on Arms Exports Assurances: Part II
...refute this concern, the Report should have examined all foreseeable and relevant factors that would affect that determination. And given the gravity of the decision, and the failure to pursue various foreseeable lines of inquiry, the Report is indefensible. In fact, we can recall that some reporting claimed that the internal State Department cables between the non-political departments reached a drastically different outcome on the assurances than the Report given to Congress does. We know that a State Department employee who was a contributing author on the first draft of...
23 Aug International Investment Law Symposium: Is Foreign Direct Investment a Blessing or a Grift?
...Arbitrators preserve the solipsistic thinking of investors, translating special interests into general principles of the regime. Normative conflict is the only possible outcome as each demographic battles over jurisdictional lines. For example, a clever argument recently pursued to support the injection of human rights into the adjudication of panels is the ‘necessity defence’ under customary international law. Do prospective violations of human rights or ecological sustainability amount to a “grave and imminent peril”, permitting states to breach their investment treaty obligations? While this might seem like overreach, some investment tribunals...