The Convention of 1936 for the Suppression of the Illicit Traffic in Dangerous Drugs represents a further stage in the development of international criminal law.

Congressman Porters resolution of January 28, 1924,1 authorizing an appropriation for American participation in two international conferences on the opium and narcotic drug traffic to be held in the latter part of this year is the most recent step in the long history of mankind's fight against his own desire for narcotics. This fight has progressed by three stages.

Many times inquiry has been made as to the legal status of the Pan American Union. Its friends have often wished that an opportunity might be afforded a court to determine that question. For the first time in its history, a court of the United States recently had occasion to pass on the matter.

Opinion 2/94, Accession of the Community to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. 17 Hum. Rts. L.J. 51 (1996).

European Court of Justice, March 28, 1996.

On April 26, 1995, die Council of the European Union requested an opinion on whether accession of the European Community to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was compatible with the Treaty Establishing the European Community (Treaty). In its request, the Council of the European Union stated that no decision on opening negotiations could be taken before the Court pronounced on die compatibility of accession with the Treaty. The Council argued that, even though a text of the envisaged agreement did not yet exist, the legal issues regarding accession were sufficientiy clear for the Court to provide an advisory opinion. The Council made clear that accession should not have any effect on the reservations entered by member states, which would “continue to apply in the areas falling within national jurisdiction.” It also explained that the “Community would agree to submit to the machinery for individual petitions and inter-State applications; actions between the Community and its Member States would, however, have to be excluded in recognition of the monopoly conferred in such matters by Art. 219 of the EC Treaty on the Court of Justice.”

To discuss the history of international economic law since the American Journal of International Law was first published in 1907 requires the author to project categories common to the parlance of 2006 back to times when theywere unknown. So far as it appears, the term did not become current until after World War II. Its scope is controversial. According to one definition, it encompasses “the total range of norms (directly or indirectly based on treaties) of public international law with regard to transnational economic relations.” A wide variety of international law rules have been said to have a financial impact somewhere. For practical purposes, in this essay I define international economic law as the international law regulating transborder transactions in goods, services, currency, investment, and intellectual property. I exclude from the inquiry issues of private international law, as well as of economic warfare.

There is a saying that when a dispute lasts for a long time, it must be about something small; for if it were not, it would be in the interest of the parties to settle it. This, however, is not the case in the boundary dispute between Ecuador and Peru. The dispute is not only one of the major international issues of Latin America, but it is also dangerous, because its long history has clothed it with considerations of national prestige and honor and because it involves a very considerable extent of territory with which neither country is willing to part. Up to the present day, the two countries have attempted to settle their differences through negotiations, treaties, arbitrations and wars—only to revive them again and again. Even the 1942 Protocol of Eio de Janeiro, which seemed finally to have settled the dispute, was declared null and void by Ecuador in 1960.

The commercial contacts of foreign governments and their agencies with the American economy are steadily growing in number and importance. In addition to the numerous foreign government-owned airlines and shipping concerns doing business in the United States, foreign government ownership of, or participation in, industrial, banking, and trading corporations doing business here is substantial. Furthermore, in more and more instances U.S. petroleum and other imports are purchased from foreign governmental entities whose contacts with the United States will probably become more extensive. Foreign governments, directly or through purchasing entities, are making huge annual purchases of American agricultural exports. The U.S. capital market continues to handle substantial volumes of borrowing by foreign governments and their instrumentalities.

On September 6, 2018, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (ICC or Court) ruled by a majority—Judge Perrin de Brichambaut dissenting—that it has jurisdiction to hear cases concerning crimes that occurred only in part within the territory of a state party to the Rome Statute. In so ruling, the Court granted the ICC prosecutor's request to rule on jurisdiction and confirmed its territorial jurisdiction over the alleged deportation of Rohingya people from the territory of Myanmar (a state not party to the Rome Statute) to Bangladesh (a state party). The Court also affirmed unequivocally its objective international legal personality vis-à-vis non-party states and hinted strongly that the prosecutor should consider the possible prosecution of at least two additional crimes in connection with this situation.

In a case of first impression, the Constitutional Court of Hungary (CCH or Court) ruled on November 30, 2016 that, in exceptional cases, it is competent to consider whether Hungary's obligations to the European Union (EU) violate fundamental individual rights (including human dignity) or Hungarian sovereignty as protected by the Hungarian Constitution. The decision places Hungary squarely within the growing group of EU member states whose constitutional courts have decided that, despite the decisions of the European Court of Justice regarding the primacy of EU law, EU member states are not compelled to violate their domestic constitutional obligations in carrying out their shared EU commitments.

After twenty-five years of climate litigation dominated by cases in the United States, Australia, and other jurisdictions in the Global North, a second wave of lawsuits arose in the mid-2010s that prominently feature cases filed in countries of the Global South. I argue that the use of human rights norms and strategies characterizes the “Global South route” to climate litigation, one that is firmly rooted in the trajectory of human rights adjudication and litigation in key Southern countries over the last three decades. I posit that, in order to understand the present and the future of this route, it is essential to (1) track its origins and features to the trajectory of “Global South constitutionalism” over the last three decades, especially litigation around socioeconomic rights, and (2) unpack the category of “Global South” countries, in order to avoid overgeneralizations and to identify the types of countries that are likely to see most climate litigation and court decisions. I close by suggesting that, in light of the planetary and urgent nature of the climate challenge, future research and advocacy should explore transnational forms of litigation that cut across the North-South divide and pay systematic attention to the impact of climate litigation.

The notion that a plastics treaty is necessary is gaining traction, but there is less agreement as to its content. Some, including this author, have suggested that a plastics treaty should be modelled on treaties such as the Montreal Protocol, which sets out a broad commitment to end the use of a particular material and then introduce regulations to ban particular forms of that material over time. This approach has an immediate appeal—it sends a signal to states and to industry that they must change their behaviors and products, while giving time to adapt to the new regulation and develop alternative materials or ways of working. The potential drawback of this approach is that some states simply will not accept such rigid standards. In addition, some states may prefer a second approach that is more obviously rooted in the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, which assigns different obligations to parties according to their respective capacities. Within the climate change regime, the Paris Agreement takes both approaches, asking states to set their own nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to emissions reductions (common but differentiated responsibilities) and then to revise these NDCs over time through an iterative process to deliver progressively more ambitious targets for emissions reduction (moving toward a ban) or mitigation. In reality, neither approach is entirely suited to regulating plastics, so a new approach to treaty-making is required. This new approach should focus on the outcomes desired rather than the practices that need to be regulated.

One of the gentle surprises of the release of the Tallinn 2.0 Manual is that it has prompted a rich debate over the nature of sovereignty in international law. In hindsight, this should not be too surprising. The modern, Westphalian project of international law is built in large measure around the state and its borders. The emergence of a technology that so readily defies those borders was bound to kick up some interpretive dust. And it appears to have done even more than that. Depending on your perspective, the Tallinn translation of international law to the cyber domain has either forced a reconsideration or surfaced a latent dispute over whether sovereignty is a binding rule of international law at all.