Harvard ILJ

Texaco operations in Ecuador began in 1964 and continued until 1992. Until 1990, Texaco served as sole operator of a concession covering approximately 1,500 square miles of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest.

In recent years, I have watched the swirling debate over whether the United States courts should consult international or comparative law. As a law professor, the debate has puzzled me, for international and comparative legal materials have always appeared in the sources consulted by American lawyers and judges. So this article is really a search for the roots of the contemporary controversy. Why is there a controversy? And what can we learn from it?

Comparative constitutional law scholarship has largely ignored political institutions. It has therefore failed to realize that radical differences in the configuration of political institutions should bear upon the way courts do their jobs.

Scholars have long understood that the instability of power has ramifications for compliance with international law. Scholars have not, however, focused on how states’ expectations about shifting power affect the initial design of international agreements.

Although the 3000 international investment treaties concluded since the end of World War II are separate and distinct international legal instruments, they constitute, as a group, an emerging global regime for investment.

Governing interstate relations across the globe, contemporary international law is universal. But this is a relatively recent phenomenon: until the nineteenth century, the laws regulating interactions between sovereign polities were circumscribed to discrete regions of the world.

This Article seeks to better define the scope of the right to self-determination at international law and its relationship with unilateral secession.

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This short article discusses tort liability for sexual harassment of women in India, China and Hong Kong. Sexual harassment is a violation of a woman’s freedom of her person, her dignity, bodily integrity and sexual autonomy.

An article in the Series: Elections or Peace?: Democracy in Times of Violence In this article series, the journal invited academics and practitioners to reflect upon the interplay between conflict and democracy, especially in light of recent instances of election-related violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Kenya, and Southern Sudan, among other places.  The series aims [...]

In a time of financial crisis and rising demand for economic protectionism, the World Trade
Organization, promoting free trade and economic growth, has never been more important.
Enforcement of the WTO’s provisions has grown increasingly contentious . . .

One point undergirds much of what follows and is therefore worth emphasizing
up front. In the article, I describe the extent and devastating impact of human rights
violations by U.N. peacekeepers. These violations are, of course, the central focus of
the debate at hand. Preventing such wrongdoing and providing appropriate remedy
when it occurs must be our guiding objectives. However, these violations must be
considered in context.