In recent years, a growing number of countries have courted controversy by regulating activities outside their borders. They have used extraterritorial lawmaking to cultivate competitive global markets, strengthen or weaken data privacy, combat foreign terrorism and military aggression, promote human rights abroad, and suppress political dissent at home. This Article explores whether extraterritorial lawmaking can be reconciled with the right to self-determination under international law. I argue that the right to self-determination entitles each national polity to determine the laws and institutions by which it is governed within its territory. Extraterritorial lawmaking violates the right to self-determination when it subjects peoples to legal norms they have not freely endorsed. This insight calls for a paradigm shift in how international lawyers evaluate extraterritoriality, with broad ramifications for legal theory and practice.

On October 7, 2023, Palestinian armed groups, chiefly Hamas's armed wing, breached the fence around the Gaza strip and launched attacks on Israeli territory. Over several hours, Palestinian fighters killed 1,269 people, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture, and took 253 hostages. The same day, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “Israel is at war,” and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched air strikes and later a ground invasion of Gaza. In the eleven months since, Palestinian groups have continued to hold, mistreat, and kill hostages and launched rockets into Israel's population centers. Meanwhile, the IDF has killed an estimated forty-one thousand people in Gaza, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture of Palestinian detainees, damaged or destroyed most of the food, water, and medical infrastructure, and restricted humanitarian access, with dire consequences. Civilian casualty experts argue the death toll (which excludes the likely greater number killed “indirectly” through disease and deprivation) far exceeds what we have come to expect from contemporary military campaigns. Both sides have committed violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), too many to list individually.

On November 9, 2023, Prime Minister Albanese of Australia and then Prime Minister Natano of Tuvalu signed the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty in Rarotonga (Falepili Union Treaty or the Treaty). The preamble explains that “the concept of Falepili . . . connotes the traditional values of good neighbourliness, duty of care and mutual respect.” It sets a groundbreaking precedent for Small Island States threatened by rising sea-levels, addressing both State continuity and climate resettlement. Nonetheless, and despite its subsequent entry into force on August 28, 2024, it has not been without controversy in Tuvalu and, to a lesser extent, Australia due to provisions seen by some as substantially infringing Tuvalu's independence in foreign relations or even its sovereignty.

Time is a Pandora's box that international lawyers have long been reluctant to fully open. Perhaps unwilling to tackle the complexities this elusive concept presents, or loath to confront past wrongs and future threats that might arise from the fabled box, international jurists have left core questions of time and international law largely underexplored. In so doing, however, they have overlooked time and temporality as useful analytical lenses through which to gain new and deeper understandings of international law as a discipline and governance system. After all, international law is entangled with time in various and multifaceted ways. International law does not simply exist in time, having its own past, present, and future. Rather, like law generally, international law is constantly being shaped, organized, and reconstructed by time, while also creating, embedding, and perpetuating temporal standards and understandings. Yet, whereas domestic law scholars have in recent decades devoted considerable attention to the complex time-law relationship, international lawyers have so far investigated this relationship in only a limited manner, focusing primarily on doctrinal and procedural questions, while leaving many theoretical issues unaddressed.