This short Essay explains why deeply embedding international law (IL) directly into domestic legal orders is seen as a helpful democratic legal strategy to make international law more effective. It also describes the logistics of embedding international law into national legal systems.
This short Essay provides an update of my recently published book, Democracies and International Law, which brings together several of my academic concerns over the past two decades.
This Essay presents a hypothetical case in which North Korean operatives, aided by operatives from Russia and China, have stolen $500 million in COVID-19 relief funds from the U.S. Treasury through hacking, all while residing in their respective countries. The purpose of this hypothetical is to explore the legal bases that the United States may use to prosecute cybercrimes and obtain judgments against foreign cybercriminals.
This Essay elaborates in three ways the call for a renewal of social science approaches to international law advanced by Daniel Abebe, Adam Chilton, and Tom Ginsburg.
Using investor-state dispute settlement as an example, this Essay discusses how the social science approach can be applied to help understand the causes of the problem of excessive duration and costs of investor-state arbitration proceedings.
This Essay advocates for the use of the social science approach in the study of international law, based on the example of comparative international law—specifically, Islamic law states’ views of the global order.
This Essay argues that the social science methodology is a useful adjunct to law, but it cannot replace the humanist ideas that constitute law.
This short Essay is a comment on the Lead Essay of the Symposium. It argues that approaches to international law depend on the lawyer's purpose, and that the social science approach overlaps with other methodologies.
The Limits of International Law received a great deal of criticism when it was published in 2005, but it has aged well. This Essay reflects on the book’s reception and corrects common misperceptions of its arguments.
This Essay takes up Abebe, Chilton, and Ginsburg’s invitation to use a social science approach to establish or ascertain some facts about international law scholarship in the United States. The specific research question that this Essay seeks to answer is to what extent scholarship has addressed international law’s historical and continuing complicity in producing racial inequality and hierarchy, including slavery, as well as the subjugation and domination of the peoples of the First Nations.
