Harvard ILJ

A review of Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History. By John Fabian Witt. New York, N.Y.: Free Press. 2012. Pp. viii, 248. $32.00.

In a timely article, Jason Yackee proposes a pair of important, attractive, and politically plausible reforms to the international investment law (IIL) system. Because his proposals offer real promise as a way to bolster the regime’s credibility and efficacy, this response will engage both the particulars proposed and the theory that informs them. I hope [...]

More information is available about the panelists at: http://www.harvardilj.org/symposium/about/panelists/ ILJ’s 2013 symposium wrapped up with a lively discussion about the role of environmental and human rights in international investment arbitration. Tyler Giannini, Clinical Professor of Law for the Human Rights Program and International Human Rights Clinic at HLS, moderated the panel in the form of a [...]

More information is available about the panelists at: http://www.harvardilj.org/symposium/about/panelists/ The second panel of ILJ’s 2013 symposium consisted of distinguished academics and practitioners with years of experience in investment arbitration. The panelists discussed remedies and damages in investment arbitration, and in particular the availability and desirability of primary remedies. Professor van Aaken, from the University of St. [...]

More information is available about the panelists at: http://www.harvardilj.org/symposium/about/panelists/ “The Design of the Investment Arbitration System: Consistency and Precedent” addressed current design flaws in the investment arbitration system. Panelists focused on the consistency of judgments and enforcement, and potential fixes to the system. The first speaker, Prof. Pieter Bekker, explored the roles of various participants [...]

On March 8, 2013, the Honorable Charles Brower offered a vociferous defense of the international commercial arbitration regime in his keynote address, “From ‘Dealing in Virtue’ to ‘Profiting from Injustice’: Tending Toward the Re-Statification of International Investment Dispute Resolution.” Judge Brower has, among other positions, served as a judge of the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal [...]

Major international legal instruments commit international law to protect language rights absolutely, irrespective of counter-pressures toward linguistic uniformity. This unconditional commitment to language rights is echoed in the writings of prominent human rights scholars, who argue that language is a constitutive element of cultural identity. This article contrasts the ideals of language rights with the actual record of their enforcement. [...]

Many celebrate international law as a way to compel states to protect human rights. Often it serves this role. But sometimes it has the reverse effect: states use international agreements to circumvent individual rights in domestic law. For example, the United States reportedly relied on Italy’s consent to render a terrorist suspect from the streets of Milan into [...]

This Article examines the adoption of rights in national constitutions in the post-World War II period in light of claims of global convergence. Using a comprehensive database on the contents of the world’s constitutions, we observe a qualified convergence on the content of rights. Nearly every single right has increased in prevalence since its introduction, but very few [...]

This Article examines the widely practiced—and widely ignored—phenomenon of “international vote buying” among states, that is, conduct whereby states offer material benefits to other states in exchange for their votes or decisions in international institutions. Domestically, such behavior would be patently illegal as bribery or election fraud. Yet under international law, it is both legal [...]

Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay, “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (Zum ewigen Frieden), established a concept of cosmopolitan law as the nemesis of war, instilling in generations of thinkers and practitioners a vision of a world without conflict. Kant’s paradigm posited that “republican constitutions, a commercial spirit of international trade, and a federation of interdependent [...]

Jason Webb Yackee’s thoughtful article, Controlling the International Investment Law Agency, is an important contribution to a growing literature on the question of the legitimacy of the international investment law (IIL) system, and, in particular, investor-state arbitration, which is largely the focus of his article.  Rather than taking a for-or-against position on the IIL system in [...]

Current targeted killings practices and the attempts to legally justify those strikes present a challenge to the systematic protection of the right to life under international law. We are now witnessing a significant effort by some states to insulate their “targeted” uses of deadly force from international scrutiny and to redefine international law in order to serve narrow and short-term interests. This presents a serious risk of leaving everyone less secure, particularly if other states around the world, as they acquire the new technology, claim for themselves the same expanded rights to target their enemies without meaningful transparency or accountability.

Concluding that the law enforcement model for preventing cyberespionage is ineffective, this article proposes a modified strategy that expands the process of responding to online economic espionage by allowing retaliation by a victim after it had analyzed the attack and determined with the necessary level of confidence that it came from a particular nation-state and, [...]

This brief commentary considers the potential effect of a territorial state’s international human rights obligations on the law governing targeted killings. It posits that these obligations should limit permissible attacks by an attacking state when the territorial state is not party to an armed conflict with the relevant non-state actor, particularly when a territorial state consents to the attacking state’s actions.