[Stuart Ford is an Assistant Professor at The John Marshall Law School.] International criminal trials are extremely complex. The average trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) takes 176 trial days and involves more than 120 witnesses and 2,000 exhibits. See here at table 2. In comparison, the average criminal trial in the United States takes less...
[Laurie Achtouk-Spivak is a member of the Bar in Paris and New York. She acts as counsel and advocate in investment treaty arbitrations before ICSID as well as other arbitration institutions. She teaches investor-State dispute settlement at the University of Poitiers. She also regularly publishes on investment treaty arbitration and is a member of the Peer Review Board of the...
[Natia Kalandarishvili-Mueller is a Lecturer in Humanitarian Law at Tbilisi State University, Institute of International Law, Faculty of Law, and a PhD Candidate at the University of Essex, School of Law. The views expressed in the post are that of the author only.] Russia still occupies twenty percent of Georgian territory. On 24 November 2014, the Russian Federation and Abkhazia, one of...
I am slammed with a couple of projects right now, but I can't help throwing this question out to the legal blogosphere. Does the new "Bipartisan Trade Priorities and Accountability Act" recently introduced by leading U.S. Senators violate the U.S. Constitution's bicameralism and presentment requirements as stated by the U.S. Supreme Court in INS v. Chadha? The BTPAA seems crucial as...
Among my many hobby-horses is a fascination with the role of the individual American states in the interpretation and implementation of international law within the U.S. In past work, for instance, I have argued that states can individually implement treaties via guidance from Uniform Laws. I had a few examples of this phenomenon in my article, and I think it will...
[Philip Allott is Emeritus Professor of International Public Law at the University of Cambridge.] Interpretation of any text – religious, political, historical, scientific, literary, artistic, legal – raises profound philosophical problems. Interpretation of a legal text is in a class of its own, because it can have direct and substantial social effects, determining people’s lives. The philosophy of legal interpretation is...
[Fuad Zarbiyev is an Associate in the International Arbitration Group of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP.] The interpretation discourse in modern international law is dominated by a textualist paradigm. This claim may seem empirically wrong if it is taken to mean that nothing other than eo nomine textual arguments features in the international legal discourse. After all, the interpretive regime...
[John Louth is Editor-in-Chief of Academic Law at Oxford University Press.] I make it 401, but more of that below. A few years ago when we carried out some research into law scholars’ habits we found many were telling us that there was so much being published that they didn’t even try to keep up anymore. I decided to try and see...
[Julian Arato is an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School.] Interpretation in International Law is something of an iconoclastic volume, from its critical ethos to its provocative structure around the metaphor of the game. The object of its revisionism, above all, is an apparently stagnant formalism that seems too prevalent in the theory and practice of interpretation in international law today. Symbolic...
Newsweek published a long article today about a petition organized by NYU students, alumni, and non-law faculty claiming that it would be "unacceptable" for Harold Koh to teach international human-rights law at the law school. Here is a snippet: While working for the Obama administration, Koh was the most public legal defender of the president’s drone strike program. Last month, a...
[Michael Waibel is a University Lecturer in Law at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law.] The rise of distinct interpretive communities goes hand in hand with the much debated topic of fragmentation in international law. Even though the VCLT’s role in treaty interpretation has been studied extensively, how interpretive communities affect treaty interpretation...
I want to start off our conversation about the larger project Bianchi, Peat and Windsor have undertaken with their new book before introducing my own contribution to it. For years, the concept of interpretation has had a fairly narrow focus within the international legal landscape. It has almost uniformly been associated with a discrete set of objects -- treaties. From Grotius...
