27.1

Summer

2026

This paper asks a foundation question in international law: Can we predict when a state will comply with a ruling from the International Court of Justice (I.C.J.)? The I.C.J. serves as the United Nations’ central forum for adjudicating legal disputes between states. However, its legal authority rests entirely on voluntary compliance, which has led many scholars to question its practical effectiveness. This paper seeks to assess the unpredictability of state compliance by examining multiple independent variables. If empirical factors such as geopolitical factors have statistical importance, it would support the view that factors outside of the I.C.J. have influence over state behavior, and in turn support skepticism toward the I.C.J. enforcement. Conversely, if variables tied to the legal proceedings are statistically important, it would suggest that states do comply with the I.C.J. if certain expectations are met. I find strong evidence that (1) states are significantly less likely to comply when they challenge the I.C.J.’s jurisdiction, and (2) the presence of a judge from the state being asked to comply is positively associated with compliance. I find (3) weaker evidence that states are more likely to comply when jurisdiction is based on a treaty or special agreement rather than compulsory jurisdiction. Finally, I found (4) weak or no evidence that geopolitical factors such as population size, GDP, or military strength had statistical importance in predicting compliance. These findings suggest that the legal process’s features, especially how jurisdiction is established and whether domestic legal actors are directly involved, are stronger predictors of compliance than broader geopolitical or economic attributes.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine produced a flood of scholarship asking how third states could legally justify providing weapons, funds, and intelligence to Ukraine. That assistance appeared to violate obligations under the venerable international law of neutrality. Many scholars argued that these neutrality “violations” could be justified under the law of state responsibility as either acts of collective self-defense or as countermeasures. Some also invoked the idea of “qualified neutrality,” a controversial principle that exempts states supporting victims of unlawful aggression from otherwise applicable neutrality limitations. This was a critical debate. The law of neutrality has been dormant for decades, especially in the immediate post-Cold War era, when the U.N. Security Council dominated the landscape of international responses to armed conflict. This scholarship sought to reconcile neutrality principles with contemporary law on state responsibility and the use of force and provide clarity in an era when collective measures by the Security Council are all but impossible to achieve.
This article responds to these well-intentioned scholarly accounts and argues that the justifications given for assisting Ukraine are misguided and, ultimately, unnecessary. Neutrality law has never involved binding obligations on third states, even in its nineteenth-century heyday. Neutrality was instead a status; a set of rights and obligations that states could choose to accept if they stayed within its limits. States could also choose to discard those limits and risk becoming parties to the conflict. Understanding neutrality as a status rather than an obligation means there is no need to justify “unlawful” transgressions of neutrality limits under the law of state responsibility. But even if third party assistance to a victim state like Ukraine were unlawful, the justifications of self-defense and countermeasures fail on their own terms. And while invoking “qualified neutrality” may appear more promising, that principle simply begs the question of how law on the use of force would conceive of third party assistance, the grounds of debate that would exist had neutrality law never entered the picture. Qualified neutrality, in other words, does not resolve the lawfulness of third party assistance but instead assumes the issue has been resolved under an entirely different body of international law. The entire effort to avoid neutrality barriers to assisting Ukraine and other victims of aggression turns out to have been a tempest in a teapot.

I. Introduction

This Comment addresses the rapidly changing legal landscape of South Korean leafleting: the practice of sending pamphlets into North Korea. Since its inception during the Korean War, the practice has been used both by the South Korean government and private parties as a propaganda device. In recent years, however, privatized leafleting has become an increasingly politically divisive instrument and its legal status has vacillated between presidential administrations.
This Comment begins by examining the historical development of leafleting (Section II) and the legal arguments regulating its practice in an effort to demonstrate the relatively high administrative cost of current regulations (Section III). The modern rendition of leafleting—as a privatized practice that sends anti-North Korean materials, religious documents, and aid supplies—is traced from its military origins and new trends, specifically a growing international interest in leafleting, is examined. Section III discusses the current regulatory landscape with a particular focus on the last five years. This Comment argues that despite these changes and a seemingly new change in direction at regulating leafleting under the new presidential administration, several underlying themes (invocation of national security concerns and regulation via amending existing frameworks rather than proposing completely new laws) reveal legal consistency.
Next, the Comment delves deeper into the existing legal scholarship regarding leafleting by focusing on the constitutional issues that supporters of leafleting allege are infringed by the new regulations (Section IV). This begins broadly with the general legal implications arising from privatized leafleting and narrows to specific constitutional issues (free speech and freedom of religion) before returning to the current state of leafleting due to the most recent laws (leafleting is essentially on a hiatus).
In Section V, this Comment assumes that the current administrative laws regulating leafleting are insufficient and instead highlights both a potentially new loophole with the use of non-Korean actors and the underreported emergence of foreign influence on leafleting. Rather than offer a polemical or apologetic argument for the legality of leafleting, this Comment proposes an alternative regulatory regime that focuses on the funding behind leafleting operations, rather than the mechanism or practice of leafleting itself. This Comment argues that regulating foreign funding for leafleting under the classification of “political activity” would more efficiently restrict the practice while also following precedential themes of national security and amending existing legal frameworks rather than creating new ones.

Despite the enactment of the Nth Room Prevention Act, digital sexual violence remains a pertinent issue in South Korea, with instances of such crimes continuing to increase. A key factor of this increase is jurisdictional: much of the crime takes place on encrypted overseas platforms such as Telegram and Signal. Focusing mainly on the crime of sextortion, this Comment presents suggestions to mitigate the jurisdictional enforcement issues. The Comment begins by providing an overview of Korea’s existing legal frameworks on digital sexual violence, examining the digital sexual violence laws pre-Nth Room Act, the revisions promulgated by the Nth Room Act, and the merits and limitations of the amendments. The Comment then engages in a comparative analysis of other countries’ laws addressing digital sexual violence, focusing on how they interact with encrypted overseas platforms. Through this analysis, the Comment draws ideas for domestic reforms Korea can implement. The Comment also analyzes international law regimes Korea can utilize; specifically, the Budapest Convention, Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs), and the complaints mechanisms pertaining to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). It further addresses concerns that increased enforcement of digital sexual violence regulations over encrypted platforms can present, namely the possible intrusion on privacy and freedom of expression rights. The Comment concludes with a proposal of concrete legal measures, both domestically and internationally, that the Korean government should implement.

I. Introduction