About CJIL Online
CJIL Online is the official digital-only imprint of the Chicago Journal of International Law. Established in 2021, CJIL Online furthers the Journal’s mission by highlighting particularly timely, dynamic, and cutting-edge developments in international and comparative law. CJIL Online also strives to be as accessible as possible—both for readers and academics seeking to publish. We review submissions on a year-round, rolling basis and consider a wide range of manuscripts, from shorter Essays to traditional Articles. CJIL Online upholds the Journal’s long-standing values of intellectual curiosity, rigor, and professionalism.
Experts predict that millions of people will need to migrate internally and across borders due to global warming. Currently, international legal frameworks do not extend the same legal protections to climate migrants as are afforded refugees and asylum seekers. While international law recognizes the right to asylum based on political persecution, there is no international right to migrate based on climate-based harms that states are legally bound to observe. This Comment proposes a climate migration lottery (CML) that would be administered internationally to address current and future climate-based migration. Under this proposal, receiving states would agree via a treaty to admit their fair share of the total pool of climate migrants selected through the lottery. Migrants from countries with a high susceptibility to having large portions of territory rendered uninhabitable by climate change would be eligible to enter the CML. This comment argues that a CML can alleviate the strain on regions in developing states that must accommodate internally displaced persons as well as the burden on countries that are near low-lying Pacific island states that will experience significant rates of displacement due to sea level rises.
Normatively, most nations agree that holding onto artifacts belonging to other peoples is both morally and legally unconscionable, but practically, there has been no enforcement scheme under international law for artifacts to finally return home. Calabresi and Melamed’s property, liability, and inalienability rules could be justified and applied to repatriation disputes through consideration of a mixture of economic efficiency, distributive, and justice motivations. Using this framework to create a model of variable protection of international law would create a comprehensive enforcement scheme that resolves the fundamental enforcement problem that international law faces in facilitating repatriation.
Multilingual treaties have a long history of interpretation at the International Court of Justice. Yet the ICJ has often ignored their unique features and interpreted them as they would any other treaty. This has led to judgments and advisory opinions that fail to reconcile discrepancies between language versions of multilingual treaties and therefore do not follow the interpretive guidelines set under Article 33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Yet these issues facing the ICJ are not unique to that Court. Many jurisdictions face the problems of multilingualism and use novel solutions that the ICJ could incorporate. This Comment begins by analyzing two challenges facing multilingual legislation in Canada and the European Union, namely: de facto unilingualism and discrepancies in language versions. Next, it will argue that both jurisdictions have relied on unique solutions to address those two challenges. Finally, this Comment will turn its attention back to multilingual treaties and the ICJ. It will argue that the same challenges that face multilingual legislation exist for multilingual treaties. Given this, it will argue that the solutions used by Canada and the EU can be applied in the context of treaties and the ICJ should adopt those solutions to better reflect the purposes of Article 33 of the Vienna Convention and the unique principles of multilingual treaties.
In October 2021, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development announced a global tax agreement that creates a territorial tax system and imposes a 15% global minimum tax. This Comment analyzes the OECD agreement by using case studies of previous multilateral tax proposals to provide historical context and by delving into various criticisms of the agreement.
In February 2022, the Russian Federation invaded the territory of Ukraine, igniting the largest military conflict in Europe since the end of the Second World War. This Article argues that under the powers articulated in the 1950 Uniting for Peace resolution, the General Assembly has the authority to convene an international tribunal capable of prosecuting the crime of aggression in Ukraine.
This Comment analyzes the range of ways that constitutions tend to incorporate human rights. It argues that the success of the method of incorporation of human rights conventions into constitutions does not produce the results one would expect, but hinges on whether the construction is able to strike a balance between ensuring that the judiciary implements international human rights standards while still leaving the judiciary with meaningful independence and agency.
Family influencer and parent-facilitated child influencer content has gained popularity and many parents are making significant money by sharing content featuring their children. This Comment assesses the potential dangers that arise from sharing a child’s personal information on a public forum and how the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) can be utilized to protect the children of family influencers from exploitation on social media.
This Article discusses the development of the modern legal consequences of surrender under the law of armed conflict and explores how technologically enabled surrender is being used in Ukraine. It concludes with an analysis of the impact of these technologies on the surrender process and presents an adaptive interpretation of existing norms, leading to three overarching themes.
The Hague Conference on Private International Law has established a working group to examine a possible international instrument applicable to the same or related actions in courts in different countries. The goal of the project should be to improve the efficiency of resolving such situations and providing as complete a resolution as possible by channeling litigation to the “better forum.” Current approaches—lis alibi pendens in the civil law world and forum non conveniens in the common law world—are not working well and are likely to be increasingly inadequate in an ever more complex and fluid world. In this Article we provide suggestions on the architecture and certain critical features of a convention in this area.
This Comment argues that corporate anticorruption compliance programs would complement existing anticorruption strategies in the Northern Triangle.
In 2020, an international tribunal acknowledged in a landmark decision that deportation to a place where climate change would put an individual’s life at risk may violate certain provisions of international human rights law. Yet, the tribunal failed to formally recognize climate refugees or provide recommendations for their protection, perpetuating a “legal void” in the global migration framework. This Essay examines how existing provisions of refugee law, international human rights law, and international environmental law could be expanded to fill this void that legal scholarship has not directly addressed.
This Comment considers the four countries that have passed domestic legislation giving private property rights over extracted space resources to their citizens: the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Luxembourg, and Japan.