The core provisions of the Rome Convention on the law applicable to contractual obligations are deceptively simple: a contract is governed by the law chosen by the parties (Article 3(1)); to the extent that the parties have not made a choice, a contract is governed by the law of the country with which it is most closely connected (Article 4(1)). However, within these provisions there are a number of problems. First, Article 3 provides that the parties’ choice may be either express or ‘demonstrated with reasonable certainty from the terms ofthecontract or the circumstances of the case’. This gives rise to potentially difficult questions about what constitutes an express choice and uncertainty as to the dividing line between, on the one hand, cases where the parties have made a choice (albeit not an expressone) and, on the other, cases where the parties have not made a choice at all. Secondly, the general principle in Article 4 is supplemented bya presumption (in paragraph 2), 1 which may, incertain circumstances, be disregarded (under paragraph 5). The operation of the presumption is problematic and the relationship between Article 4(2) andArticle 4(5) controversial.

In May 2003 the United Nations General Assembly approved an agreement between the United Nations and the Cambodian government (UN Agreement) providing for United Nations assistance in the establishment and operation of ‘Extraordinary Chambers’ within the domestic court structure of Cambodia.1 The UN Agreement is the result of a lengthy process of negotiation between the United Nations and the Cambodian government, with the intervention of several interested states.2 The final agreement reflects a compromise between the need to address impunity and the need to preserve Cambodian sovereignty.

This article explores how a procedural approach in the case law of the ECtHR combines subsidiarity and progressive development of international obligations. Rather than constituting a simple retreat from substantive commitments, it renders the obligations of Conventions States more flexible and has the potential to enhance the democratic legitimacy of the Court's rulings. This article first sets out various aspects of proceduralization in international human rights law. This is followed by a discussion of how procedural approaches are linked to subsidiarity. In the case law of the ECtHR, procedural approaches facilitate dynamic evolution, both in the practice of Convention States (analytic or bottom-up approach) or by the Court itself (constructive or top-down approach). This interaction of the procedural approach and arguments based on European Consensus allows the ECtHR and domestic institutions to fulfil their ‘shared responsibility’ for the effective protection of human rights in Europe.

International investment law can be criticized for its understanding of sovereignty. Informed by the works of Koskenniemi, this article reimagines ‘sovereignty’ based on a host State population exercising its right to economic self-determination. Recent transparency initiatives in international investment law support this conceptualization of sovereignty. Further, the stance taken aligns with the continuous evolution of the international investment law regime. The establishment of a different perspective on sovereignty in international investment law highlights the need for an alternative understanding of this term if international investment law is to achieve widespread approval.

The concept of sovereignty plays too large a part in contemporary discussion. No nation is sovereign in the sense that it is free to do what it wants within its own borders and not subject to influences from outside. It is not self evident either that political systems have to be hierarchically organized or that there should be one final arbiter of law for all decisions. There are advantages in having different centres of power for decisions affecting differing matters. There is a case for the co-existence of overlapping power centres and for sharing in decision-making and being prepared to live with a decision which does not in itself reflect the wishes of your State. There are advantages in being part of a larger conglomerate. The State can then have some influence and control over what goes on outside its boundaries. There is no reason why that conglomerate should itself be a large sovereign State. The European Union offers the hope of transcending the sovereign State rather than simply replicating it in some new superstate. It may prove to be a model and an inspiration.

Chinese judicial practice demonstrates great diversity in enforcing exclusive jurisdiction clauses. In practice, the derogation effect of a valid foreign jurisdiction clause is frequently ignored by some Chinese courts. It may be argued that these Chinese courts fail to respect party autonomy and international comity. However, a close scrutiny shows that the effectiveness of an exclusive jurisdiction clause has close connections with the recognition and enforcement of judgments. If the judgment of the chosen court cannot be recognized and enforced in the request court by any means, the request court may take jurisdiction in breach of the jurisdiction clause in order to achieve justice. Chinese judicial practice demonstrates the inevitable influence of the narrow scope of the Chinese law in recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. It is submitted that the Chinese courts do not zealously guard Chinese jurisdiction, or deliberately ignore party autonomy and international comity. Instead, the Chinese courts have considered the possibility of enforcement of judgments and the goal of justice. Applying the prima facie unreasonable decision test is the best the courts can do in the specific context of the Chinese law. The status quo cannot be improved simply by reforming Chinese jurisdiction rules in choice of court agreements. A comprehensive improvement of civil procedure law in both jurisdiction rules and recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments is needed.

Maritime interceptions continue as a fundamental dimension to external border controls against irregular migration, as seen most recently in Australia's institution of Operation Sovereign Borders in late 2013. The practice of developed States has highlighted the varied application and interpretation of four bodies of international law: the law of the sea, search and rescue obligations, refugee obligations and international human rights law. This article assesses this practice and the use of laws, highlighting the fragmentation of international law that has resulted. A proposal is presented to harmonize these laws and reconcile the divergent policy perspectives of different stakeholders.

This article considers whether the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement for the Sudan (the CPA) gives rise to binding obligations for the parties under international law. The legitimacy and effectiveness of the CPA, and the avoidance of a return to bloody civil war, depends significantly on the Agreement giving rise to legal obligations. While it has been held in arbitration that the CPA is not a treaty, this article suggests that it is a binding international agreement and further that there are obligations concerning the outstanding referendum for the people of the Abyei region. The legal issues of the CPA are more complex than they at first appear and they engage deeper and broader questions of the role of international law. The article will suggest among other things that the Sudan situation demonstrates it is difficult to draw immutable general rules in abstraction about the international law relating to peace agreements and to self-determination.

Questions surrounding the legitimate extent of the judicial role have long been the source of controversy. Concerns that unelected and unrepresentative judges are ‘legislating’ rather than interpreting the law or are interfering in matters of ‘democratically endorsed’ government policy, have often been, and will continue to be, raised by academics and politicians alike. The question is one of separation of power— of the appropriate constitutional role and division of functions between the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the United Kingdom Government. This debate has been given a new dimension by the Human Rights Act 1998 (hereafter HRA), most obviously through the courts' exercise of their power under section 3(1) of that Act—the duty to interpret primary and secondary legislation to be, as far as possible, compatible with ‘the Convention rights’. Indeed much has been made of the unique method by which the HRA reconciles the interpretative obligation under section 3(1) with the sovereignty of Parliament by way of the ‘declaration of incompatibility’ under section 4. The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty imposes limits on the scope of section 3(1); in spite of its ‘broad and malleable’ language, which might permit ‘an interpretation which linguistically may appear strained’, it does not sanction courts to act as legislators. As Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead noted in Re S; Re W, attributing to a statutory provision ‘a meaning which departs substantially from a fundamental feature of an Act of Parliament is likely to have crossed the boundary between interpretation and amendment’. That case has been seen by some as a retreat from what has been termed the ‘far-fetched’ interpretation of section 3(1) adopted by the House of Lords in the earlier decision of R v A. Nicol, for one, has argued that Re S; Re W and Anderson taken together, clearly reject ‘the notion that “interpretations” could conflict with clear statutory words' — as R v A had arguably suggested — thereby endorsing parliamentary sovereignty, above the Convention, ‘as the country's supreme constitutional doctrine’. For it to retain its legitimacy therefore, the judicial act under section 3(1) needs to remain an exercise of ‘interpretation’: to attribute a meaning to a legislative provision ‘quite different from that which Parliament intended … would go well beyond any interpretative process sanctioned by section 3 of the 1998 Act’. It would ‘not be judicial interpretation but judicial vandalism’.

A burgeoning international interest in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a means of mitigating the effects of climate change has raised a number of novel legal issues, one of which concerns ownership of the underground sites in which captured carbon dioxide can be stored. This paper considers the extent of a surface landowner's rights above and below land and explores the treatment of underground space within the context of CCS in relation to differing jurisdictions. Particular attention is paid to legal principles applied in the United Kingdom and the United States, and consideration is also given to relevant legislation in Australia and Canada.

This article considers the basis on which the English courts exercise their discretion to refuse to recognise foreign marriages1 whose formal validity2 is beyond question and whose essential validity3 is probably also satisfied.4 It has been widely stated that this discretionary veto is to be wielded in accordance with the dictates of “public policy”. As far back as 1945, Lord Greene MR said that such matters were to be resolved “with due regard to common sense and some attention to reasonable policy”.5 Nearly 40 years later, Lord Simon, similarly minded and speaking in the House of Lords, was a good deal more emphatic. He said: “[t]here is abundant authority that an English court will decline to recognise or apply what would otherwise be the appropriate foreign rule of law when to do so would be against English public policy”.6 Perhaps surprisingly, this policy-based discretionary veto has commanded virtually no academic attention.7 It is my intention to address that anomaly. It is wholly inadequate, as is sometimes done, both by the courts (as we have seen) and academics, simply to refer glibly to “public policy” as though its contents were somehow self-evident and its meaning plain.8 It is also signally unenlightening merely to state, as Jaffey has done, that “[t]he premise should be that an invalidating rule of a domestic system, whether English or foreign, should only be applied to a given international marriage if there is a good reason for its application”.9 So doing merely recasts one nebulous term, “public policy”, as another, “a good reason”. Judicial synonyms have been scarcely any more illuminating. Take for example Lord Simon's famous enjoinder to have recourse to “common sense, good manners and a reasonable degree of tolerance”.10 A number of familiar criticisms can be made of the opacity of such broad terms as “common sense”, “good manners” and “a reasonable degree of tolerance”: they deny the common law the clarity, consistency and objectivity that are frequently (and correctly, in my view) thought to be necessary in order to legitimate and constrain the adjudicative function.11 But beyond these objections, two further, more particular criticisms can be made in respect of the invocation of “public policy” to deny recognition to “offensive” foreign marriages.

The protection of foreign investment by treaties often clashes with the State's sovereign right to investigate economic crimes committed by investors. This article examines the different approaches taken by tribunals to questions concerning admissibility and jurisdiction, applicable law, the standard of review, the burden and standard of proof and deference to actions taken by domestic courts and regulators related to economic crimes. It concludes that investors should not automatically be deprived of treaty protections and their access to investment arbitration blocked. The arbitration agreement, being autonomous from the main contract (or the relevant treaty), should, as a rule, remain valid even if the conduct of investors is tainted by economic crimes. The article calls on investment tribunals to reflect in their awards on the contributory fault of the parties when representatives of States and investors are both complicit in economic crimes. To achieve greater legal certainty and procedural efficiency, a new generation of investment treaties and the practice of investment tribunals should draw on not only applicable domestic law but also existing sources of international law concerning economic crimes or national best practice.

[I]t is the transformation of custom into customary law—into something that State courts will recognize, enforce and require—that disrupts the continuity of the indigenous systems. In pre-colonial times … [the settlement of disputes] … depended … on the mutual processes of negotiation and compromise. There is no need to romanticize these processes…. But the important point in this context is that norms play a very different part in negotiations to that which they play in legal processes. They may be used to stake out negotiating positions as a starting point from which to proceed or as a sounding board as to the correct procedure in the cultural and symbolic sense, but they cannot be cited as rules or conditions that will be imposed.1

At the 2002 conference of ICCA (International Commercial Congress of Arbitration), the conference participants debated the following proposition: ‘the parties, not the arbitrators, control the arbitration.’ Thus, the proposition permitted only two answers—either the parties or the arbitrators control the arbitral process. Both answers were consistent with the contractualist theory of arbitration: