Publications

” Given the abundance of existing League scholarship, the aims of the present contribution cannot but be modest. What it offers is a series of sketches of the League, as seen from the distance of a centenary. These sketches approach their object from two perspectives: three of them provide a highly condensed account of the League’s life (section II); two others draw out some of its legacies (section III). Needless to say, the engagement is selective, the treatment unfinished. But the sketches hopefully capture essential aspects of the League and draw the readers’ eye to features that are worth remembering a century later. ” https://www.duncker-humblot.de/zeitschrift/german-yearbook-of-international-law-gyil-22/?page_id=0&jaids=2019&page=1&type=titel#titlelist

International tribunal backlash remains poorly understood: hampered by conceptual challenges, systematic research into the causes of this phenomenon remains nascent. The present article makes two contributions to advancing this endeavour. First, building on existing literature, it sets out a working definition of international tribunal backlash, tailored to facilitate mixed method empirical research into the causes of backlash across institutions and sectors. Second, drawing on international relations’ pluralist turn, the article provides an analytically eclectic theoretical scaffold for causal analysis of international tribunal backlash, enabling standardised cross-institutional and sectoral comparison without over-simplifying the complexity of backlash in various instances. The article accordingly provides the building blocks for improved understanding of the causes of – and the potential scope to manage – international tribunal backlash across institutions, regions and sectors.

“This chapter examines the contribution of investment arbitration to international dispute settlement more generally in relation to matters of evidence and procedure. Part 1 examines the practice of a number of inter-State dispute settlement fora in an attempt to gauge the contribution of the considerable body of practice of investment arbitration which has been built up over the course of the last few decades. It is shown that, at least at this point in time, this contribution is difficult to discern and appears to vary from one context to another.”

“This chapter examines international adjudication and arbitration, assessing the diverse roles of international courts and tribunals (ICaTs) in relation to violent conflicts. It shows that, over time, ICaTs have come to render decision upon decision, but – contrary to the expectations of early arbitration movements – hardly ever prevent ‘wars between nations’. Their mandates have been expanded, but typically only cover aspects of violent conflicts. While such aspects are today increasingly submitted to arbitration or adjudication, ‘conflict litigation’ remains controversial and challenges the authority of ICaTs. As the chapter demonstrates, the significance of arbitration and adjudication over questions of violent conflict has varied over time and forms part of the general history of international dispute resolution. Having surveyed this general history, the chapter sketches out the evolving legal framework governing courts and conflicts. It discusses which aspects of violent conflicts are addressed by ICaTs under contemporary international law and highlights current challenges of ‘conflict litigation’.”

“In this chapter, I examine the interplay between state obligations to eradicate extreme poverty and realize socio-economic rights under International Human Rights Law (IHRL) and some of the legal regimes and economic paradigms that sustain global capitalism. Advocates of rights-based solutions to poverty tend to focus on how mechanisms to advance relevant categories of human rights, above all socio-economic rights, can be strengthened. Their analyses typically ignore questions of how other legal rights and legal regimes may function as obstacles to the eradication of poverty and the realization of human rights. I contest the long-standing assumption of IHRL that the goal of realizing human rights—and socio-economic rights in particular—is compatible with the operations of global capitalism, and I seek to demonstrate that the legal regimes necessary to sustain capitalist political economy are, in fact, routinely productive of poverty and of violations of socio-economic rights.”

“International criminal law (ICL) poses distinctive challenges to the scholarly agenda of global constitutionalism. Descriptively, ICL qua criminal law implies a distinctive institutional process – the trial – that is largely unknown to constitutional processes. It is nonetheless via the trial and its assigned functions that global authority is exercised in the international criminal realm. Can global constitutionalism account for the role of the international criminal trial? Further, international criminal tribunals employ particularly coercive tools to perform its functions: it arrests suspected offenders (with the assistance of states), interrogates them, judges them, may convict and ultimately imprison them. Can global constitutionalism normatively account for this coercive aspect?.”