Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

the dozens of book reviews written in response. The reaction might lead one to believe that rational choice theory and IL-proponents are doomed to conflicting positions. Not so, says Joel Trachtman, who has a new book out, The Economic Structure of International Law (Harv. Univ. Press, 2008). Trachtman (a former professor of mine) along with my current colleague Jeff Dunoff were among the first to advocate using economic theory to assess international law. In his current book, Trachtman offers an overarching theoretical model for applying “rational analysis (but not necessarily...

I was going to wait until the book — entitled The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa — came out to mention it, but now seems like an opportune time. You can pre-order the book from Amazon here, and here is the description: A revealing account of how Israel’s booming arms industry and apartheid South Africa’s international isolation led to a secretive military partnership between two seemingly unlikely allies. Prior to the Six-Day War, Israel was a darling of the international left: socialist idealists like David Ben-Gurion...

[Paul B. Stephan is the John C. Jeffries, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Law and David H. Ibbeken ’71 Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.] I applaud Anupam Chander for picking a great subject for his book. New communications technologies have transformed the way we deliver services by radically lowering the cost of dematerialized, long-distance transactions. The resulting explosive growth of cross-border sales of services is one of the most significant aspects of the modern global economy. There are, of course, a host of books about the...

[Rachel Brewster is Professor of Law at Duke Law] There is much to admire in Katerina Linos’ new book, The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How Health, Family and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries. Linos elegantly integrates a disparate set of literatures – international relations, domestic politics, and transnational diffusion – to construct a powerful and persuasive account of the transmission of social policy between states. The book is a remarkable achievement. It uses sophisticated statistical models as well as case studies and polling data to establish the causal argument...

I want to congratulate Mark Pollack and Gregory Shaffer for their recently published book When Cooperation Fails: The International Law and Politics of Genetically Modified Foods (Oxford 2009). Using the WTO proceeding as a focal point, When Cooperation Fails explores the vexing question of why multiple international and bilateral initiatives have failed to resolve the transatlantic GMO dispute. The book offers a clear and detailed tour of “the difficulties, limits, and outright failures of international cooperation” (pp. 3, 280) for regulating GMOs. It also details the success that international institutions...

[David Zaring is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School] Pauwelyn, Wessel, and Wouter’s excellent book, which in turn marks the fruition of a project on informal international lawmaking that they dub IN-LAW, is pretty good on the theory end of things, which is what this post will look at, and also critique. Organizationally, the editors cracked the whip creditably – each chapter is organized, features a takeaway, and follows well. But should you read it? PWW develop both a definition and...

1901-1945 time frame. Here’s a quick description of the project as a whole: From its earliest decisions in the 1790s, the U.S. Supreme Court has used international law to help resolve major legal controversies. This book presents a comprehensive account of the Supreme Court’s use of international law from the Court’s inception to the present day. Addressing treaties, the direct application of customary international law and the use of international law as an interpretive tool, the book examines all the cases or lines of cases in which international law has...

...book addresses this issue through the lens of various “decision-makers”, being international judges (chapter 4), arbitrators (chapter 5), regulators (chapter 6), legal advisers (chapter 7), and officials (chapter 8). The essential thesis of the book is that when such decision-makers disobey international law, they “ought not to claim a unique exception for themselves”, as that only serves to encourage others to follow suit and act inconsistently with the relevant rule; rather they should “explain their reasons for disobedience”, in order to permit other decision-makers to decide if those reasons have...

[Allison Stanger is Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics and Chair of the Political Science Department at Middlebury College. She is the author of One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy.] This is the first day of our book symposium on Laura Dickinson’s book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Related posts can be found below. Laura Dickinson has written a compelling and thoughtful inquiry into the larger implications of...

...within a broader historical context. That is what I did, delving into the fascinating sixteenth century” (p.41). In the year of its publication, the work was promoted in various newspapers as “the most comprehensive study conducted to date on Chile’s Antarctic rights against the claims of other countries” (for example, in the editions of El Mercurio, La Nación, and La Hora from November 5, 1944). Knowing the impact of his book, these newspapers were compiled by Pinochet de la Barra in his personal library. Various publishers praised the book for...

[Rachel Brewster is Professor of Law at Duke Law] One of the many virtues of Eric Posner and Alan Sykes’ new book, “Economic Foundations of International Law,” is that it provides the reader with a theoretically coherent and consistent overview of important international treaty regimes, substantive international rules, and state enforcement practices. The book is a lucid introduction to international law for students and also contains sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of international legal systems for academics and international lawyers. A major theme of the book is that state compliance...

[Jeffrey Dunoff holds the Laura H. Carnell Chair at Temple University Law School] This post is part of our symposium on Dean Schiff Berman’s book Global Legal Pluralism. Other posts can be found in Related Posts below. Paul Berman has produced a terrific, and terrifically ambitious, work of scholarship. The book presents a compelling case that the current legal order is marked by multiple and overlapping international, transnational, national, sub-national and non-state normative orders. Paul argues that relations among these various orders should be managed through a “cosmopolitan pluralist” approach...