Author: José E. Alvarez

[José Alvarez is the Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law at New York University School of Law and is the Co-Editor-in-Chief (along with Benedict Kingsbury) of the American Journal of International Law] As the new co-editor in chief of the AJIL, I, along with my co-EIC, Benedict Kingsbury, are very grateful to Chris Borgen and Opinio Juris for hosting this...

As a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law, I was asked to give my reactions to the International Law Commission’s release, on first reading, of a set of proposed articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations. (For the ILC’s report containing these draft articles and commentaries, see here). I was probably asked to undertake this...

In the same month that I traveled to Barcelona, I went to Paris to attend a conference organized by Paris I Professors Emmanuelle Jouannet and Hélène Ruiz Fabri and Professor Mark Toufayan of the University of Ottawa. According to its organizers, the purpose of the symposium, on “The Third World Today: Assessment and Perspectives,” was to “evaluate the situation of...

The IISD’s paper on transparency I mentioned this morning demonstrates why the investment regime is globalization’s Rorschach test. Recent scholarship (most prominently the work of one of the participants at Barcelona, York University Professor Gus Van Harten (see, e.g., “A Case for an International Investment Court,” available here) contends that investor-state arbitration is nothing like the commercial arbitration between private...

The opportunity to guest blog on Opinio Juris is most appreciated. It is almost like having the ASIL Presidency forum all over again.  My first topic emerges from a conference hosted by the Canadian-based Institute for Sustainable Development in Barcelona in July 2010. The Institute invited a number of practitioners and scholars to address the topics of transparency and independence in...