Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

and family policies, which are politically contested and fiscally significant, makes her book all the more interesting. This choice allows for a particularly original look at the influence of international law, which rarely focuses on social policy questions. Governments have tried to shape the family decisions on women’s employment and the fertility patterns for decades, the book notes. Their desire to do so will likely only increase with the looming demographic crises across the developed world, which calls for increasing women’s participation in the labor force while also heightening the...

Accordingly, the book is not organized doctrinally, in terms of air pollution, marine pollution, chemicals, and so forth. Instead, it is organized thematically, with chapters on such topics as the causes of environmental problems, the varieties of international norms, the obstacles to international cooperation, the design of international agreements, policy implementation, enforcement and effectiveness. Process issues have received increased attention in recent years but have not yet received a book-length treatment. My new book aims to fill that gap. Rather than focus on one or two aspects of the international...

[Andrew Guzman is Professor of Law and Director of the Advanced Law Degree Programs at Berkeley Law School, University of California, Berkeley.] This is a superb book. I say this without the slightest bit of surprise, as that is what one would expect from these authors. In addition to the quality of the content, the book is all the more important because there is no comparable tour of international law from a law and economics perspective. I have disagreements with some of the content of the book – it would...

...of Opinio Juris’ very pertinent symposium about the role of international law in responding to the crisis. One sub-question that may not come immediately to our minds is the relevance, if any, of international criminal law (ICL) and international criminal justice vis-à-vis pandemics like the COVID-19 one. Are notions of individual accountability and of criminal conduct relevant in this particular context?  Is there a role for international criminal justice in the prevention of, and response to public health emergencies of this kind? Many will advance a negative answer to these...

[Jean Galbraith is Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Camden School of Law] This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-3 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I want to thank Opinio Juris and the Leiden Journal of International Law for putting together this symposium. I am especially grateful to Professor Dov Jacobs for organizing this session and to Professors Mark Drumbl and Meg deGuzman for their thoughtful comments about my article. Some years back, I noticed how frequently international...

[William Partlett is an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution.] This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 53(2) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. The Democratic Coup d’Etat is an important article. First, and most obviously, this Article carries significant policy implications. The political transformations sweeping the Middle East and North Africa – known as the “Arab Spring” – have presented a wide range of conceptual challenges to policymakers and political...

...accountability response and can it be both? We conclude here that it can, and indeed, should be both. This issue will be discussed further in GRC’S expert webinar on 19 May. Given the array of conflict settings where food is being weaponised against the civilian population, UNSC 2417 faces a test as to its agility and efficacy (see GRC’s piece related to this on Tigray and Alex de Waal’s damming account here). Scope and purpose of UNSC 2417 The resolution creates a mechanism for UNSC action on the issue of...

[William W. Burke-White is Deputy Dean and Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania Law School.] This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 54(1) symposium. Other posts from this series can be found in the related posts below. Natalie Lockwood’s article, “International Vote Buying,” recently published in the Harvard International Law Journal, makes an important contribution to a set of understudied questions around the legality and appropriateness of international vote-buying. Lockwood quickly admits that international law itself says little about the legality of such vote buying...

[Eyal Benvenisti is the Anny and Paul Yanowicz Professor of Human Rights at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and Global Visiting Professor at New York University School of Law.] I am grateful for the three incisive and insightful comments. Due to space limitations I will not be able to do justice to any of the comments in this response, but they will certainly help in my future work on this subject. I will use this brief response to clarify some parts of my argument and to situate the article...

same words that conclude my book: The justification for international law does not depend on whether it is law. It depends on whether the international legal system is effective and good. . . . On final analysis, international law is what we make of it, for it is nothing more or less than the sum of our decisions. If my book provides a framework to clarify our disagreements and find solutions, as we have begun to do in this Roundtable, then I have achieved what I set out to do....

Professor Ku’s review of When International Law Works is most insightful. I thank him for it. His “short bloggish description” of its thesis is as clear a summary of my book as I’ve been able to muster in two sentences. I confess I will probably appropriate it when I present the book at Temple Law School later this week. Professor Ku raises a good question about how predictive my “theory” is. Certainly theory in the hard sciences is often predictive. Many such theories are expressed as falsifiable hypotheses. In contrast,...

...to Influence States: Socialization and International Human Rights Law” has lead many international lawyers to focus not only on only political science and economics, but also on sociology. It inspired me to write this book. Their comments invite debate on several empirical issues, as well as on two major theoretical questions: 1) Do diffusion studies imply that “international law is weaker than generally recognized”? 2) How does my theory of diffusion through democracy connect to theories of state socialization, and more generally to research on constructivism and sociological institutionalism? Which...