In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Mohsen al Attar

03 Mar

International legal scholarship is undergoing a metamorphosis. Scholars may quibble over the catalyst and trajectory, but they concur that a shift is underway. At least this was the premise of a symposium organised by the Chicago Journal of International Law this past week, entitled The Transformation of International Law Scholarship. The event showcased three American legal academics: Daniel Adebe, Adam Chilton, and Tom Ginsburg....

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25 Feb

I draw your attention to the title. It is an amalgamation of two phrases. Follow the money is pithy, even a little crass. It is often uttered in television crime dramas, usually to aid the protagonist identify the culprit. The Misery of International Law is the title of a book by Linarelli, Salomon, and Sornorajah. So provocative is this text on International Economic Law (IEL) that it...

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02 Feb

What is power? Which states have it, and which don’t? Are there some processes that accelerate its ascendancy and others that quicken its decay? Most of all, how does public international law (PIL) correspond to this concept and to these processes? In Emerging Powers and the International Order, Andreas Buser touches upon all of these questions. In the following post,...

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19 Nov

What does the dean of a law faculty do? I asked myself this question throughout my academic career. Most of the time, they appear both indispensable and irrelevant in equal measure. Deans are quixotic, sometimes even hostile. They do not teach; they produce little research; and many law faculties are acrimonious places, suggesting that organisational leadership is not within their...

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31 Aug

Formalism in the teaching of international law is burning out. This is not surprising. Its application always seemed impractical, suffering from the theory’s glaring defects as well as unique flaws when administered to international law. Treaty interpretation and state practice, for example, the two most suitable facets for formalist analysis, proved deficient in producing the conclusive-qua-correct outcomes that formalists fetishize....

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11 Jun

Ideas about global capitalism have been in constant flux since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, imperialist theorists such as Hobson and Hilferding argued that inter-state rivalries would bring down the castle; WWI and WWII seemed poised to do just that. Fast-forward to the 1950s and not only did this not happen but the castle was...

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