International law scholarship remains locked in a raging debate about the extent to which states do or do not comply with international legal norms. For years, this debate lacked empirical data altogether. International law advocates tended to assume that most nations obey most laws most of the time and proceeded to measure state activity against international norms through conventional legal analysis. In contrast, international relations realists and rational choice theorists have argued that international law is simply an epiphenomenon of other state interests with little independent power at all. Meanwhile, constructivist and transnational legal process approaches have posited that international law seeps into state behavior through psychological and sociological mechanisms of norm internalization and strategic action. But even these studies tend to remain on a theoretical level, without on-the-ground data about which factors might influence compliance in actual day-to-day settings.

In October 2003, the Israeli permanent representative addressed the United Nations General Assembly on why Israel felt compelled to build a lengthy barrier spanning hundreds of kilometers across certain areas of the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River. Among other things, Ambassador Dan Gillernian stated:

The June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights witnessed the extraordinary success of efforts by women’s rights activists worldwide to end the historic disregard of human rights violations against women. Indeed, women’s human rights was perhaps the only area in which the World Conference can be said to have met the challenge of defining a forward-looking agenda twenty-five years after the last world conference on human rights. The conference significantly expanded the international human rights agenda to include gender-specific violations. The final conference document, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, identifies particular examples of gender-specific abuses as human rights violations and calls for integration of women’s human rights throughout United Nations activities. Most strikingly, the conference crystallized a political consensus that various forms of violence against women should be examined within the context of human rights standards and in conjunction with gender discrimination. This Note reviews the treatment of women’s human rights in the Declaration and Programme of Action and related developments in the preparatory process for the World Conference.

Are there forcible acts that, because of their small scale or confined purposes, are not covered by the prohibition of the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter? The argument that there exists a “gravity threshold,” below which the prohibition of the use of force is inapplicable, appears to be gaining ground in legal doctrine. In a similar vein, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia stated in its report that the “prohibition of the use of force covers all physical force which surpasses a minimum threshold of intensity” and that “[o]nly very small incidents lie below this threshold, for instance the targeted killing of single individuals, forcible abductions of individual persons, or the interception of a single aircraft.” Other types of acts that have sometimes been characterized as insufficiently “grave” include operations aimed at rescuing nationals abroad, “hot pursuit” operations, small-scale counterterrorist operations abroad, and localized hostile encounters between military units. This article investigates relevant practice and legal statements from many such situations, while adding a number of conceptual observations. It concludes that excluding small-scale or “targeted” forcible acts from the scope of Article 2(4) is conceptually confused, inconsistent with customary practice, and undesirable as a matter of policy.

Since September 11, 2001, legal experts have focused significant attention on the lethal targeting of individuals by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. An equally significant legacy of the post-9/11 administrations, however, may be the decisions to target specific kinds of objects. Those decisions greatly affect the success of U.S. efforts to win ongoing conflicts, such as the conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). These decisions may also become precedents for military attacks that states consider lawful, whether carried out by cyber or kinetic means, in future armed conflicts.

To achieve the goal of destroying ISIL, President Obama embraced what many in the international law community long regarded as off-limits: targeting war-sustaining capabilities, such as the economic infrastructure used to generate revenue for an enemy's armed forces. Although the weight of scholarly opinion has for years maintained that such objects are not legitimate military targets, the existing literature on this topic is highly deficient. Academic discussion has yet to grapple with some of the strongest and clearest evidence in support of the U.S. view on the legality of such targeting decisions. Indeed, intellectual resources may be better spent not on the question of whether such objects are legitimate military targets under the law of armed conflict, but on second-order questions, such as how to apply proportionality analysis and how to identify limiting principles to guard against unintentional slippery slopes. In this article, I discuss the legal pedigree for war-sustaining targeting. I then turn to identify some of the most significant second-order questions and how we might begin to address them.

In recent years, scholarly attention has increasingly focused on the lawmaking effect of General Assembly resolutions. The citation of previous resolutions in later resolutions of the General Assembly is one potentially significant aspect of this question, yet there has been no examination of it in legal literature. Anyone familiar with the Assembly’s work knows that the phenomenon is pervasive. 1,149 resolutions, just over half of the 2,247 passed in the first twenty-one sessions of the General Assembly, refer to previous resolutions, and the cited resolutions have been invoked an average of 2.68 times. More important from a legal standpoint is the fact that a very few resolutions have been cited much more often than the average. Resolution 1514 (XV) was cited in 95 subsequent resolutions in the first six sessions following its passage, and Resolution 217(111) was cited 75 times in its first nineteen years. Seven resolutions have been referred to on more than sixteen occasions since their approval by the General Assembly, and seven have been cited more than twice in each session since passage. A consideration of the legal relevance of this phenomenon seems worth pursuing, and any such inquiry must begin first of all with an over-all theoretical analysis of General Assembly resolutions as a source of international law.

In 1908 the second volume of the American Journal of International Law featured a piece by Lassa Oppenheim entitled The Science of International Law: Its Tasks and Method. Oppenheim began his article by noting, apparently with some approval, that the first volume of AJIL, stacked with articles only by Americans, had “shown to the world that America is able to foster the science of international law without being dependent upon the assistance of foreign contributors.” Concerned, however, that students were “at first frequently quite helpless for want of method [and] mostly plunge into their work without a proper knowledge of the task of our science, without knowing how to make use of the assertions of authorities, and without the proper views for the valuation and appreciation of the material at hand,” Oppenheim sought to bring “the task and the method of this our science into discussion in this Journal.” What followed was a comprehensive exposition of his views on the purposes of international law and the methods available to lawyers and scholars for approaching the problems they face.

One of the most important issues in the law of the World Trade Organization is the right of WTO members to adopt measures for nontrade purposes. In the WTO’s General Agreement. on Tariffs and Trade (GATT 1994) and General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), this right is secured in general exceptions provisions, which permit WTO members to adopt measures to achieve certain objectives, notwithstanding any other provisions of these agreements and also, in some cases, other WTO agreements. These objectives include, most importantly, the protection of public morals, the maintenance of public order, the protection of human, animal, or plant life or health, the enforcement of certain domestic laws, and the conservation of exhaustible natural resources.

Central to the World Court’s mission is the determination of international custom “as evidence of a general practice accepted as law.” Students of the Court’s jurisprudence have long been aware that the Court has been better at applying customary law than defining it. Yet until Nicaragua v. United States, little harm was done. For in the sharply contested cases prior to Nicaragua, the Court managed to elicit commonalities in argumentative structure that gravitated its rulings toward the customary norms implicit in state practice. The Court’s lack of theoretical explicitness simply meant that a career opportunity arose for some observers like me to attempt to supply the missing theory of custom.

In the last decade, many political scientists, economists and lawyers have suggested that national economic and regulatory systems may be converging globally. Economic, ideological and sociological factors, as well as action by the world’s great powers, may be facilitating cross-national convergence of economic systems and the globalization of some sectors. Globalization of the telecommunications industry and cross-national convergence of related national laws may serve as one of the stronger examples of this phenomenon.

International law owes much to American judges and to American jurists. The list of those who have contributed to its advancement is not short and includes the names of Marshall, Story and Field, Kent, Wheaton, with his able commentators, Dana and Lawrence, Halleck and Lieber and, among recent writer’s, Taylor, Moore and Snow. Although his name is not connected with a general treatise on the subject of public international law, it may be doubted whether any of his fellow-workers in that field have rendered a more important service to humanity and to international good neighborhood, than has Dr. Francis Lieber in his memorable “Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field.”

The entry of Latin America into the community of nations is one of the most important facts in the history of civilization. It resulted not only in widening the field occupied by International Law but also in radically modifying its character. Although the Latin States of America inherited the civilization of the peoples of Europe, they developed along different lines. In number, and in the fact of their common origin they were like the members of one large family who had been suddenly and almost simultaneously called into independent life.

This combination of circumstances caused these nations, upon their appearance in the general society of states, to exclude from their constitutions the principles of European public law which did not harmonize with the special character of their organization; and to reject, in their foreign relations, those principles and practices that were incompatible with their independent position or that did not favor their special conditions of development.

The law governing the admission of reservations to treaties has evolved over the past sixty years, as is demonstrated by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which incorporates a regime on reservations that represents a significant change in the law as it was generally understood in the first part of this century. Whereas it was once widely considered that the unanimous consent of the other parties to a treaty was required to admit a reservation, the Vienna Convention implemented a new system in which this condition is generally not necessary. The regime on reservations is contained in section 2 of the Convention (Articles 19-23), which, together with the definitional article (Article 2(1)(d)), determines what constitutes a reservation, the criteria it must meet to be permissible, and the effect it will have, both in the event that it is accepted by other contracting states and in the more problematic event that it is not.

The concept of “soft law” in international law has been familiar for some years, although its precise meaning is still debated. A distinguished international lawyer, Professor Ignaz Seidl-Hohenveldern, delivered a series of lectures on International Economic “Soft Law” at the Hague Academy of International Law in 1979. The concept as applied to economic affairs is of particular interest in relation to the subject matter of this article.

March 29, 1919

The Preliminary Peace Conference at the plenary session on the 25th January, 1919 (Minute No. 2), decided to create, for the purpose of inquiring into the responsibilties relating to the war, a commission composed of fifteen members, two to be named by each of the Great Powers (United States of America, British Empire, France, Italy and Japan) and five elected from among the Powers with special interests.

The Commission was charged to inquire into and report upon the following points:

1. 1. The responsibility of the authors of the war.

2. 2. The facts as to breaches of the laws and customs of war committed by the forces of the German Empire and their Allies, on land, on sea, and in the air during the present war.

3. 3. The degree of responsibility for these offences attaching, to particular members of the enemy forces, including members of the General Staffs, and other individuals, however highly placed.

4. 4. The constitution and procedure of a tribunal appropriate for the trial of these offences.

5. 5. Any other matters cognate or ancillary to the above which may arise in the course of the enquiry, and which the Commission finds it useful and relevant to take into consideration.