This article discusses the importance of the recently concluded Paris Rulebook, the extent to which it limits national discretion, instils discipline and generates ambition and accountability, and the challenges that lie ahead in implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement. It discusses, in particular, the rules on mitigation, transparency, the global stocktake and the implementation and compliance mechanism, in order to highlight the choices Parties made on three overarching issues that have long bedevilled the climate change regime—prescriptiveness (the level of detail of the rules), legal bindingness (the extent to which particular rules are legally binding) and differentiation (the extent to which particular rules accommodate differences between Parties or apply uniformly to all Parties).

In the wake of increasing corporate disasters, there has been an urgent need to address the impact of business on human rights. Yet business responsibilities for human rights are mainly voluntary and best understood as ‘soft law’. Recently, however, States have begun negotiations for an internationally binding treaty in this area, suggesting that there is a need to turn to ‘hard law’ to increase the efficacy of business and human rights (BHR) initiatives. This article argues that because soft and hard law concepts are not dichotomous, BHR governance need not become ‘hard law’ to be effective. Rather ‘hardened’ soft law instruments can be equally effective.

Literature on the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), particularly that written by citizens of States that are Consultative Parties to the Antarctic Treaty, has often been celebratory in character. The ATS, we have been told, is a model of international co-operation. The regime has prided itself on addressing issues ahead of crisis situations; and, since the conclusion, and subsequent entry into force, of the Environmental Protocol, with its protection of the Antarctic environment. This acclaim of the system that manages Antarctic affairs may be to a large extent warranted. Antarctica has remained peaceful and its value as a scientific laboratory has in recent years been enhanced through the contribution of Antarctic science to understanding environmental issues of global concern. But the environmental credentials of the Treaty System will be immeasurably weakened if it continues to display such a huge anomaly between its treatment of mining and that of tourism. Tourism is covered by only a very weak application of the precautionary principle while the application of the precautionary principle to the issue of mining has been ‘extreme’. The principal factor behind this anomaly appears to be political opportunism.

The UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement of Goods, Construction and Services,1 adopted in 1993/4, provides a template for reforming regulatory systems on public procurement. A decade on, UNCITRAL is now considering a review.2 This is timely for several reasons, not least because of new purchasing practices, especially in electronic procurement, and the increasing need for harmonization with other international norms. In this context, the present article offers a critical appraisal of the Model Law as a global standard for public procurement.

Since the outset of the financial crisis, the EU financial markets regime1 has been undergoing a period of turbulence which contrasts sharply with the period of relative stability which it briefly enjoyed over 2005–2007 and post-FSAP (Financial Services Action Plan2). The FSAP reforms had been adopted. The Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR) had emerged as an influential actor, driving some degree of supervisory coordination and co-operation and constructing a significant soft law ‘rule-book.’ And the 2007 Lamfalussy Review suggested broad political, institutional and stakeholder satisfaction with the Lamfalussy process. There was little enthusiasm for grand adventures in institutional design, albeit that supervision, an institutionally-driven concern, was presciently if belatedly emerging as a concern of the EU institutions. The Review's main concern, however, was with strengthening the pragmatic, if somewhat haphazard, network-based, ‘supervisory convergence’ model as the means for supervising the integrating EU financial market. With respect to regulation, reflecting the wider international zeitgeist pre-crisis,3 ‘Better Regulation’ and the need for a ‘regulatory pause’ were the watchwords of a Commission which, once the massive FSAP regime was safely in place, espoused the benefits of self-regulation and highlighted the risks of intervention without impact assessment, extensive consultation and evidence of market failure.4 This was most apparent with respect to credit rating agencies,5 debt market transparency,6 hedge funds,7 and clearing and settlement.8 Institutionally, a relatively sophisticated law-making apparatus, in the form of the Lamfalussy structures, a plethora of advisory bodies and stakeholder bodies (notably FIN-NET which represents the consumer and SME interest), had been established.

This article scrutinizes the last ten years of the academic debate on EU citizenship law taking nine fundamental disagreements among scholars as starting points. It explores EU citizenship's relationship with three groups of issues of fundamental importance, including the place of this concept within the fabric of EU law, the influence of this concept on the essence of the Union as a system of multi-level governance, and its impact on the lives of ordinary Europeans. A large number of key works which influenced the Court and the legislator in the recent years is assessed to outline the likely direction of future research, as well as EU citizenship's future development. Although the literature on the subject is overwhelmingly rich and diverse, this article aspires to provide a representative sample of issues of interest for the framing of the concept at issue from a supranational perspective, necessarily leaving national literatures aside.

Over the past 30 years, sub-state national societies in a number of developed liberal democracies—particularly Quebec, Catalonia, and Scotland within Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom respectively—have both reasserted their national distinctiveness and demanded recognition of it in constitutional terms.1 This re-emergence of sub-state national sentiment within industrially advanced States, and the struggle for constitutional change which has accompanied it, are considered by many observers to be strangely incongruous at a time of economic and cultural ‘globalization’ where the power of the nation- State itself seems to be waning.2 Why do sub-state nations, the common refrain asks, seek statehood when the very concept of State sovereignty is losing its meaning? This article will argue, however, that the rise of sub-state nationalism even at a time when the resilience of State sovereignty is itself coming into question, is in fact not as paradoxical as it might at first appear, at least insofar as this process is taking place within developed democracies.3 It will be contended that the elaborate constitutional programmes which are now beingadvanced by sub-state nationalist movements for the reform of their respective host States are inmany respects informed by, and reflective of, wider transformations in the patterns of State sovereignty.

Codification conventions and draft articles completed by the International Law Commission are often—and increasingly—invoked by courts, tribunals, governments and international organizations as ‘reflections of customary international law’. This article discusses the factors explaining the authority that these ‘non-legislative codifications’ have come to enjoy in international legal reasoning. Moving beyond the traditional explanations of codification conventions as evidence of State practice and ILC draft articles as the teaching of publicists, it considers how, against the backdrop of the uncertainty of customary international law, institutional factors (relating to authorship, representation and procedure) and textual factors (including prescriptive form and the absence of a distinction between ‘codification’ and ‘progressive development’) converge to convey the image that the resulting texts constitute the most authoritative restatement of the existing law. It then assesses this phenomenon in light of the political ideal of the international rule of law. While non-legislative codifications contribute to enhancing the clarity, consistency and congruence of international law, the fact that they may portray novel rules as reflecting existing law inevitably raises legality concerns.

Can a military occupation-and all the responsibilities of an occupying power as laid down in the laws of war—end at a single moment in time, and without the actual departure of the foreign military forces involved? This is the core question posed by the planned twin events of 28 June 2004 in Iraq: (1) the assumption of full authority by the sovereign Interim Government of Iraq, and(2) the proclaimed end of the US-led occupation of Iraq that had begun during the war of March-April 2003.

There are several reasons, pertaining to both the development of a generallyapplicable framework and the elaboration of issue-specific approaches, why it is timely to reflect on whether liability regimes are an appropriate tool for international environmental protection. At the level of general norms, the International Law Commission (ILC) appears to have arrived at a crossroads, as it must decide whether and how to approach further work on liability for transboundary environmental harm. At the same time, discussions about issuespecific liability regimes have proliferated. Indeed, it seems that few multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) can be negotiated today without running across the liability issue in one way or another. The issue often divides Southern delegations, which tend to push for the inclusion of liability regimes, and Northerndelegations, which tend to resist. But the disagreement is not just a matter of policy and politics. There is also a lively debate in the literature about the pros and cons of international liability regimes. All the more reason, therefore, to assess whether engaging in the laborious task of developing a liability regime is a good investment of scarce negotiating resources. The goals that animate the quest for environmental liability are important ones: to make polluters pay for the environmental costs of their activities, to compensate innocent victims, to protect the environment, and, in certain contexts, to protect developing countries against environmental risks. The key question is whether, given these sensibilities, the approach makes sense.

It has been believed for many years, indeed centuries, that the Channel between Great Britain and Continental Europe could be crossed only by boat. This belief has come to an end, albeit—at least for the time being—at a price which does not allow huge financial investments to be turned into a profit. The belief that in the legal field differences between English or Anglo-American common law and French and German—or, rather, Romanistic and Germanistic—legal systems are unbridgeable (or should I say “un-chunnelable”?) is even more widespread. That is the subject of this article: to show that differences between legal systems may, as a result of the European Union, be less unbridgeable than before, at least in certain areas of the law.

It was Robert Nozick who, distinguishing the classical liberal ‘night-watchman State’ which protected citizens against violence and enforced contracts on their behalf, conjured instead the ‘ultra-minimal State’1 in which the task of the State is confined to the monopolization of violence rather than the actual provision of security (unless paid for by citizens by choice). On the face of it, it seems that Western governments are increasingly keen to move towards this model of the ultra-minimal State and to allow even the provision of force to be assumed by private enterprise on a contractual model in which the rich or the desperate may choose to avail themselves of fortifications at the going rate while the rest take their chances in life. The ultra-minimal State is left with a residual steering2 policy role in which the parameters of contractual engagement for protection can be set. In short, it appears that nothing is sacrosanct in the onward march of the principles of neo-liberalism. Even the ultimate bastions of establishment—Her Majesty's armed forces—are not immune from processes of commodification and marketization that have previously been applied to core functions such as policing3 and imprisonment.4

Adopted in October 2020, the Artemis Accords are a set of 13 provisions establishing a principled framework for the sustainable human exploration of the Moon and the other celestial bodies, including the exploitation of their natural resources. This article examines the extent to which the Artemis Accords comply with international law and international standards. It argues that, while rooted on the provisions of the Outer Space Treaty, the Artemis Accords introduce a significant innovation in international space law by replacing the anticipatory approach to the regulation of outer space activities with the staged principle of adaptive governance.

While the rights of domestic workers are expanding in international law, including through the adoption of the ILO Domestic Workers Convention in 2011, migrant domestic workers remain particularly vulnerable to employment-related abuse and exploitation. This article explores the intersection of the employment law and migration law regimes applicable to migrant domestic workers in the United Kingdom, France and Ireland. The article suggests that the precarious immigration status of many migrant domestic workers renders employment protections, such as they exist in each jurisdiction, largely illusory in practice for this group of workers. The labour standards contained in the Domestic Workers Convention, together with the recommendations of the UN Committee on Migrant Workers on the features of an appropriate immigration regime for migrant domestic workers, are identified as providing an alternative normative model for national regulatory frameworks.

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change is relevant to human rights law, not for what it says about human rights— which is next to nothing—but for what it says about the need to address the risk of climate change taking global temperatures above 1.5 or 2 °C. The Agreement could work, or it could fail by a large margin, but those who want to influence the outcome can still do so. That includes the human rights community. Since climate change is plainly a threat to human rights, how should the UN human rights institutions respond? Should they use their existing powers of oversight to focus attention on how States parties implement (or fail to implement) commitments made in the Paris Agreement? Or should they recognize a right to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment? Either choice would represent a significant contribution to the debate on human rights and climate change, giving humanity as a whole a voice that at present is scarcely heard.