While the United States has had almost fifty years of experience with anticorruption law involving transnational enforcement, Brazilian anticorruption enforcement has not yet celebrated its first decade. In the notorious Car Wash case, however, Brazil is wrestling with the largest anticorruption investigation ever. The Car Wash case has resulted in numerous claims brought by a host of domestic agencies and foreign governments, many of which lack experience in anticorruption law. This essay argues that the Car Wash case reveals the weaknesses of the transnational anticorruption legal apparatus in Brazil. At both the national and transnational levels, the lack of coordination and the existence of competition among different levels of authority have undermined the main pillar of the regime: the collaboration agreements and the corresponding protection granted to whistleblowers. The Car Wash case illustrates how the current transnational anticorruption legal regime fails to promote order over disorder.

Nienke Grossman offers a much needed overview of the statistical patterns behind the substantial underrepresentation of women in international courts benches. As her inquiry reveals, despite the growing proportion of female qualified lawyers, sex representativeness has hardly improved in recent years. On the contrary, in the absence of special requirements in courts’ statutes or judicial selection procedures, the percentage of women judges has actually stagnated or even declined in some cases. Such acute sex imbalance cannot be attributed to the (contingent) fact that not enough qualified women are available for such highly prestigious positions. Grossman persuasively contests the plausibility of this widespread assumption. Not only is the limited-pool argument fallacious, but, as her analysis suggests, part of the problem might actually be that judicial selection procedures lack transparency and are not driven by merit. Instead, nominations of international judges are often used “to reward political loyalty or to advance political agendas”; this practice seriously impinges on the chances of women to be appointed as international judges, as politics (both domestic and international) remains very much a male-dominated sphere.

As a relatively well-defined subset of global migration law, refugee law and policy present important sites for contestation, agenda setting, normative pronouncements, and symbolic action. They are also an effective test of whether formal state obligations—in this case those outlined in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention—translate to protection in the weakly legalized environments in which most of the world's refugees reside. This essay asserts that they do not. Building on research and public engagement across African cities, this short contribution makes a three-part argument to that end. First, it considers categories by highlighting the narrow practical and analytical value of focusing on legal reforms and formal “refugee” policy as determinants of protection; given that legal status and documentation have only limited practical protection effects. Moreover, it points to the potential dangers and dysfunctions of a protection regime premised on people “performing” or “representing” refugeeness. Second, in considering areas for intervention in improving the protection of migrants, it calls for rescaling the legal approaches to migrant and refugee protection. Given the micro and translocal (often transnational or diasporic) processes informing refugees’ experiences, approaches need to be both more and less geographically targeted. Lastly, it calls for an intersectional approach to law and advocacy that more holistically and politically situates refugees and migrants within their social and regulatory environments. If nothing else, it asks analysts and advocates to take more seriously subnational political formations—formal and informal—as sites of policy formation and practice. In doing so it suggests that the most effective tools for addressing migrant and refugee vulnerability are often more political than legal. Moreover, within the realm of international and domestic law, jurisprudence in fields other than migration and asylum (e.g. environment, labor, or trade) may offer the most effective inroads into processes producing displacement or imperiling people on the move or on arrival. Given the confines of space, data is sparingly used for illustrative purposes.

Legal rules come and go. Methods of producing law may also flow and ebb. The authors of the call for papers in connection with this online Agora suggest that there is possible evidence that treaty as a method of producing international law is ebbing, and may be dying. I see no such evidence at present; rather, I argue here that the dying source of international law is not treaty but custom. In the more distant future, however, treaty, too, may become obsolete or at least less salient.

There are four categories of tools of international social cooperation: (i) international law produced through treaty (referred to herein simply as treaty); (ii) international law produced through custom, known as customary international law (CIL); (iii) international law produced through international organization decision-making (international legislation); and (iv) non-legal cooperative institutions (soft law). One of the signal characteristics of treaty is that no state is bound that has not explicitly and specifically consented. In order to sharpen the difference between treaty and international legislation, let us focus on international legislation produced by majority voting, which today is rare outside the European Union, but which may bind states without their specific consent.

On March 6, 2018, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU or Court) rendered its judgment in Slowakische Republic (Slovak Republic) v. Achmea B.V. (Achmea decision) in response to the German Federal Court of Justice's (Bundesgerichtshof) request for a preliminary ruling. Deciding for the first time on the compatibility of the arbitration provision in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) with European Union (EU) law, the Court concluded that the investor-state arbitration clause in the Dutch-Slovak BIT was incompatible with EU law because it violated the principle of autonomy. The Court will soon respond to Belgium's request for an Opinion on the Canada-EU free trade agreement (FTA), where it will rule on the compatibility of extra-EU investment agreements with EU law.

The first non–stop flight to Europe was, perhaps, a victory for the cause of peace and international goodwill, but to those who have followed the developments in aerial warfare and the attempts which have been made in recent years to formulate rules for the conduct of belligerent operations in the air, this and successive flights come as a reminder of the still nebulous state of international air law.

In the last few years, many proposals have been made requiring either changes in the administration and financing of the United Nations or a revision of the Charter of the United Nations. While some progress has been made in the first category of problems, to the extent that they require primarily changes in the working of the United Nations Secretariat, it became quite obvious that a revision of the Charter is not likely to be made in the near future. It may be possible, however, to achieve important changes in the functioning of the principal organs of the United Nations—the Security Council, the General Assembly and the International Court of Justice—without revision. Pending a change in the international situation, various steps can be taken in the interim that would considerably improve the functioning of these organs, and achieve some of the desirable goals by measures that, while not ideal, will provide practical solutions for a few important problems. Several such solutions are investigated in the three sections of this essay.

The Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Slovenia v. Croatia marks the anticlimax of a long-running territorial dispute. It is also only the sixth time the CJEU has issued a judgment in a case instituted by one European Union member against another. Among these cases, it is the first to consider an arbitral award in a dispute between members, the first to consider a boundary dispute between members, and the first to be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. The Court found that it cannot rule on alleged infringements of European Union law when these arise from the breach of a treaty falling outside of the Union's subject-matter competence. Most directly, the Judgment may pose significant consequences for European Union internal affairs in the near term, such as Croatia's ambitions to join the Schengen Area and the Eurozone. More broadly, several of the Court's findings will be relevant beyond the European legal order, particular those concerning the meaning and effect of “ancillary” legal questions, and the bilateral or multilateral character of a dispute involving admission to an international organization.

Once the domain of a few spacefaring nations, outer space has exploded with new actors, state and private, in recent years. New actors and activities bring new potential threats and concerns for new and existing actors alike. In this complex environment, where mistrust and misunderstanding often prevail, international law can play an important role in bridging gaps and creating predictability, clarity, and consistency. Although new treaty law is unlikely, the ordinary incremental international law processes of state practice, opinio juris, and international jurisprudence will help to resolve critical questions about the content and application of international law in outer space over time.

The World Trade Organization's (WTO's) dispute settlement system is facing “unprecedented challenges,” with the current U.S. government waging a “stealth war” on the Organization's Appellate Body (AB). The tactics of this war include procedural objections to the (re)appointment of AB members—those individuals selected to sit in Geneva and rule on trade disputes. Countries have blocked appointments in the past, but the Trump administration's strategy to effectively shut down the AB's ability to hear disputes—by bringing the number of sitting judges below the required three to hear a dispute—represents a new development. In short, the trade regime is dying a slow, piecemeal death, with American challenges “killing the WTO from the inside.” Yet the sources of this crisis are not new. The organization's judges and bureaucracy have deftly managed simmering discontent for nearly two decades, but we have now reached a boiling point. In this contribution, I first describe the sources of the current impasse before discussing how the WTO's adjudicative bodies have sought to address government dissatisfaction in the past and the implications of such judicial responsiveness for reform of the system moving forward.

The doctrine of servitudes as it stands at present in international law is in a very incoherent state. From the Roman law the concept, with an elaborate set of rules for its operation but with no philosophic or theoretical development, was transmitted at the time of “the Reception” to the semi-feudal jus publicum of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the doctrine was taken over by the developing jus gentium.

This experience, this double growing over from private law to public law and thence to international law, has sadly shattered the doctrine. The modifications made by feudal and dynastic and mercantilist manipulation have warped the concept out of all symmetry. Indeed, it is possible that traits picked up en route have ruined the doctrine for modern use.

The members of the Central American Peace Conference, held at Washington in 1907, primarily intent upon devising all possible ways and means of maintaining permanent peace in the Isthmus, sought to introduce into the treaties which resulted from the Conference not only those means and recourses which experience had shown would preserve good understanding and harmony among the five states, but, more particularly, they endeavored to find new methods which would strengthen the desideratum of the Conference by eliminating the causes of civil or interstate wars which might in the future occur in the Central American countries.

Naturally, the arsenal to which the Conference had to turn for the new arms to combat the causes of and prevent all war and revolution, could be none other than historical experience and the principles of international law.

The International Opium Commission proposed by the United States and accepted by Austria-Hungary, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam convened at Shanghai on the 1st of last February, completed its study of the opium problem throughout the world, and based on that study, issued nine unanimous declarations. The Commission adjourned on February 27th.

On October 25, 1986, the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law decided to divest the Society’s investment portfolio of stocks in all corporations “with direct investments in South Africa.” This action, which was taken by the Council after considerable debate, superseded the Society’s former policy of investing only in corporations with a high ranking under the “Sullivan principles.” The Council’s action is worthy of note in light of recent divestment-related actions, but especially because the resolution of economic considerations was informed by wider issues of law, moral policy making and human rights.

After two decades of hate and antagonism following the war, Japan and the Republic of Korea (hereinafter referred to as the ROK) took a step towards amicable relations, with the signing of the normalization treaty and related documents on June 22, 1965, in Tokyo. The suspicion existed among Koreans, however, that normal relations would again bring the ROK under Japan’s economic and political domination. On the other hand, the opposition party in Japan found it unfeasible at that point for Japan to select from the divided nation of Korea the ROK as its friend. Overcoming opposition within both their parliaments, the Governments of Japan and the ROK each succeeded in securing the majority necessary to ratify these documents. The instruments of ratification were exchanged in Seoul on December 18, 1965.

This Essay explores the sanction of “non-participation,” which has been used against Russia following the start of the war in Ukraine. After mapping out the multifaceted instances of Russia's exclusion from international organizations, the analysis considers the legality of measures adopted that do not have an explicit basis in institutional rules. The Essay concludes with broad reflections on the use of international organizations as platforms to stigmatize and isolate the violator and outlines some consequences and functions that the sanction of “non-participation” has today.

On January 18, 1919, the forty-eighth anniversary of the proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles after the invasion of France in 1870-1871, there assembled in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Paris a meeting of the representatives of the Allied and Associated belligerent Powers, as well as the Powers which had broken off diplomatic relations, to decide upon the terms of peace to be offered to Germany and her allies.

Emulating Bismarck, who used the emasculated telegram of Ems as the pretext of waging a war of conquest upon France, William II and his General Staff seized upon the rupture between Austria-Hungary and Serbia growing out of the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince at Serajevo in June, 1914, as the pretext for launching Germany upon a carefully prepared program of world domination. Fearful lest delay might result in the loss of the opportunity for which she had deliberately planned and anxiously awaited, within a week after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, Germany had declared war on Russia and France and had shamelessly violated the neutrality of Belgium which she had solemnly undertaken to respect. Great Britain, for self-protection and in response to treaty obligations, immediately entered the war against Germany, and was successively followed from time to time, as Germany evinced her disregard of international law, the laws of war and the dictates of humanity, by all the other large Powers and many of the smaller ones whose interests were jeopardized or rights infringed upon by Germany’s increasingly reckless and ruthless conduct.

The Oil Nationalization Act passed unanimously by both houses of the Iranian Parliament in March, 1951, raised once more the long-standing issue of Iran's claim to sovereignty over Bahrayn. The Iranian extremists, from both the left-wing Tudeh Party and the right-wing Fida'iyan Islam group, at first criticized Parliament for its silence about the oil of Bahrayn but, when the law for the expropriation of the Anglo-Iranian Company was enacted in April, they demanded that these laws should in like manner be applied to the Bahrayn Petroleum Company, jointly owned by the Standard Oil Company of California and the Texas Company, on the grounds that the Bahrayn Islands form a part of Iranian territory.