Print
Article
23.2
Hiding in Plain Sight: An ILO Convention on Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains
James J. Brudney
Joseph Crowley Chair in Labor and Employment Law, Fordham Law School.

Thanks to William Alford, Kate Andrias, Aditi Bagchi, Janice Bellace, Martha Chamallas, Colin Fenwick, Jennifer Gordon, Desiree LeClercq, Kamala Sankaran, Lee Swepston, Bernd Waas, and Benjamin Zipursky for valuable comments and suggestions at different stages of this project; to Janet Kearney for superb research assistance; and to Fordham Law School for generous financial support. The author is a member of the International Labor Organization Committee of Experts, but this Article is presented solely in his individual capacity as a law professor. It does not reflect the views of the Committee or the ILO.

This Article proposes a solution to the primary challenge currently confronting governments, employers, and workers under international labor law: how to promote and protect decent labor conditions in global supply chains.

Print
Article
23.2
Discursive Constitutionalism
Ngoc Son Bui
Professor of Asian Laws, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.

Many thanks to Timothy Endicott, Tom Ginsburg, Tarun Khaitan, Genki Kimura, Han Liu, Koichi Nakano, and participants of the Oxford Faculty Research Seminar for their useful comments.

This Article develops the concept of discursive constitutionalism, defined as the construction of constitutionalism through public discourse.

Print
Article
23.2
Accounting for the Selfish State: Human Rights, Reproductive Equality, and Global Regulation of Gestational Surrogacy
Claudia Flores
Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School.

This paper was presented at a faculty workshop at Yale Law School in March 2022. As such, it benefitted from insight, comments, and suggestions from workshop attendants. Special thanks to Doug NeJaime, Judith Resnik, Amy Kapzynski, Oona Hathaway, Michael Wishnie, Jim Silk and Mindy Roseman for conversation and suggestions. Thanks, as well, to Tom Ginsburg for thought-provoking discussions on surrogacy in the course of producing Episode 5 in Season 1 of the Entitled Podcast. Past collaborations with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Center for Reproductive Rights served as a critical background to this work. I’m grateful to Carol Kim, Maggie Niu, Elizabeth Lindberg, Sophie Desch, and Simone Gewirth for excellent research and editing assistance. A final thanks to the student research team of the University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic (Kelly Geddes, Marcela Barba, Marie Umbach, and Alexa Rollins) who were partners in the fact-finding in Cambodia and the interviews of A, C, and K.

This Article argues that state responses to surrogacy raise serious questions about the state’s discretion to cabin and eliminate reproductive choice and autonomy. True global enjoyment of human rights depends now, and will depend more and more, on how states respond to transnational human rights challenges like that of surrogacy; state cooperation across borders is and will become increasingly necessary to satisfy treaty commitments involving equal and full realization of fundamental rights.

Print
Comment
23.2
Applying Derivative United Nations Immunity to Humanitarian NGOs
Tori Keller
B.A. 2017, Stanford University; J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School.

I would like to thank the board and staff of the Chicago Journal of International Law for their constant guidance and support and Professor Eric Posner for his insightful feedback.

This Comment assesses the bases for U.N. immunity and the similar concept of derivative sovereign immunity, whereby sovereign governments extend their immunity to quasi-government entities and private contractors. It argues that derivative immunity from states is based on a principal-agent relationship and that this relationship may be found in some U.N.-NGO partnerships.

Print
Comment
23.2
It’s Raining Rockets: Heightening State Liability for Space Pollution
Sraavya Poonuganti
J.D. Candidate, 2023, University of Chicago Law School; B.A., 2019, College of William & Mary.

First, I would like to thank the entire editorial board and staff of the Chicago Journal of International Law for their assistance and feedback in refining this Comment. Second, I would like to thank Professor Lee Fennell for her invaluable mentorship and guidance in writing this piece. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their endless love and support.

This Comment proposes a novel solution to establish a security deposit program that participating spacefaring nations must pay into in order to launch objects and satellites into outer space, modeled after existing international environmental law efforts to solve the issue of marine debris.

Print
Comment
23.1
WIPO’s Proposed Treatment of Sacred Traditional Cultural Expressions as a Distinct Form of Intellectual Property
Alberto Vargas
J.D. Candidate, 2023.

First, I would like to thank the Chicago Journal of International Law staff and editorial board for their help refining this Comment. Second, I would like to thank Professor Adam Chilton for serving as my faculty advisor on this Comment. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their love and support.

The U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization's recent Draft Articles propose a tiered rights system in which the owners of sacred traditional cultural expressions (TCEs) receive more protective rights than the owners of secular TCEs. While the instinct to protect the intellectual property of indigenous groups is admirable in light of indigenous groups’ exploitation and exclusion from Western intellectual property regimes, a protection system that all nations accept has been difficult to reach. Even more so, a system that differentiates among TCEs based on their sacredness will need to be justified to convince as many nations as possible (or at least a critical mass of nations that heavily influence international intellectual property policy) to adopt WIPO’s proposed system. This Comment explores potential justifications for the Draft Provisions’ sacred versus secular distinction.

Print
Comment
23.1
Clearview AI, TikTok, and the Collection of Facial Images in International Law
Miriam Kohn
BA 2017, University of Rochester; JD Candidate, 2023, The University of Chicago Law School.

I would like to thank Professor Richard McAdams, Rachel Katzin, and Joshua Fox for their editorial guidance; Christopher Perkins for his explanation of the technical details of hash values; Professor James Hathaway, Professor Benedict Kingsbury, Navya Dasari, Helena von Nagy, Theresa Oliver, Diana Kenealy, Rebecca Jin, Julia Krusen, and Mason Pazhwak for their feedback through the 2022 Salzburg Lloyd N. Cutler Fellowship; and the entire editorial board and staff of the Chicago Journal of International Law for their invaluable assistance throughout the publication process.

Private companies’ collection of facial images is on the rise globally, which has major implications for both economic development and privacy laws. This Comment uses the facial recognition technology company Clearview AI and the video sharing app TikTok as case studies to examine the problems raised by these practices.

Print
Essay
23.1
Retooling Sanctions: China’s Challenge to the Liberal International Order
Timothy Webster
Professor of Law, Western New England University.

My thanks to both Professor Ginsburg for the invitation to participate in the conference, and the editors of the Chicago Journal of International Law for their editorial assistance.

Tom Ginsburg’s Democracies and International Law is an intellectual tour de force, emphasis on tour. He begins in Gambia and ends in Fiji, surveying a broad sweep of developments on national, regional, and global scales.

Print
Essay
23.1
Democratization’s Discontents: Rediscovering the Virtues of the Non-Intervention Norm
Brad R. Roth
Professor of Political Science & Law, Wayne State University. J.D., Harvard University, 1987; LL.M., Columbia University, 1992; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1996.

The use of international arrangements to “entrench” domestic political systems has been a quintessential post-Cold War-era project. Although this project had rather unsavory antecedents in the history of the international order—from the early nineteenth-century Congress of Vienna’s anti-republican alliance to the late twentieth-century machinations of the United States (U.S.) and the Soviet Union to maintain friendly governments in their respective spheres of influence—the 1990s version drew moral authority from the emergence of an ostensibly universal authoritative measure of governmental legitimacy.

Print
Essay
23.1
The Role of Transnational Civil Society in Shaping International Values, Policies, and Law
Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat
Lecturer in Law and Global Human Rights Clinic Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

I am indebted to Professor Aziz Z. Huq for his insightful comments on an earlier draft. I am also grateful to Simone Gewirth for citation and research assistance.

In Democracies and International Law, Tom Ginsburg makes predictions about the character of international law in a world where authoritarian regimes continue to gain ascendancy, not only in number but also in sheer power. From an analytical and empirical perspective, he makes a convicting argument that international law is likely to accentuate features that protect and advance authoritarian leaders’ principal objective: survival in power.

Print
Essay
23.1
Tianxia, or another Grossraum? U.S.–China Competition and Paradigm Change in the International Legal Order
Tokujin Matsudaira
Professor, Kanagawa University Faculty of Law.

Thanks to Professor Tom Ginsburg for inviting me to join the 2022 CJIL Symposium. Special thanks to Professor Fu Pei-Jung of the National Taiwan University Department of Philosophy, who is also a well-known expert on Chinese philosophy, for his guidance in developing this topic; and Professor Yasuo Hasebe of Waseda University Law School, one of distinguished constitutional scholars in Japan, for sharing his thoughts on reading Chinese classics. I am also indebted to the CJIL editors for their efforts in bringing this Essay to publication.

In Democracies and International Law, Tom Ginsburg again shows his ability to craft general theories using his insight into the diversity of legal order. My comments will focus on Chapter 6 of this book because it contains the essence of Ginsburg’s comparative jurisprudence.

Print
Essay
23.1
International Institutions and Platform-Mediated Misinformation
Aziz Z. Huq
Frank and Bernice Greenberg Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School.

Tom Ginsburg’s excellent book Democracies and International Law provides a careful, multifaceted account of how democratic nation states and international instruments and institutions interact. This brief response Essay takes up just one thread in the book’s comprehensive tapestry. A pressing worry in contemporary democracies is the effect of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube on the quality of democratic debate. Many complain that platform-mediated misinformation and hate speech damage the democratic practice of public debate. They are also said to undermine dispositions of truthfulness and mutual trust. All these necessary predicates to democratic stability are said to be at risk due to misinformation of both domestic and foreign origin. I consider here whether international law or institutions provide resources for mitigating (or perhaps exacerbating) these harms.