Print Archive

This Comment responds to a lack of scholarship on the climate change-human trafficking nexus by exploring the predicted impacts of climate change on human trafficking. In light of these forecasted developments, this Comment argues that the United Nations Trafficking Protocol contains a textual basis through which states may recognize people who have been made vulnerable to trafficking by climate change.

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 Comment evaluates whether states have any legal recourse under public international law against entities that hack into submarine cables.

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 Comment argues that courts should adopt a rebuttable presumption against Hague Convention Article 13(b) defenses to international child abduction that are predicated on the risks of an infectious disease, or “zone of disease” defenses. Taking parents facing Hague Convention litigation have invoked Article 13(b), which provides a defense against a child’s return if there is “a grave risk that his or her return would expose the child to physical or psychological harm or otherwise place the child in an intolerable situation," based on the risks associated with international travel during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

This Comment argues that legal sex work, when regulated adequately, comports with international law and promotes the human rights of sex workers that are curbed when the practice is outlawed.

This Essay brings Abebe, Chilton, and Ginsburg’s Lead Essay into conversation with the literature on comparative international law to ask whether the social scientific approach to international law is “international.” In particular, this Essay takes the case of scholarship on international law in China to examine why or why not particular methodological and theoretical perspectives on international law may gain traction in certain jurisdictions’ legal academies.