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