This editorial aims to foster debate on the possible roles of implicit social cognition in international law. The editorial is in part inspired by a book entitled Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, written by Banaji and Greenwald, researchers of social psychology. According to them, a large set of implicit biases reside in our minds, which may influence our behaviour towards ourselves and others. It is safe to argue that international judges, arbitrators, diplomats, domestic officials who apply international law, and international legal scholars are not immune from implicit bias. Within international legal scholarship, some relevant experiments have already been conducted in unveiling decision makers’ intuitive and automatic thinking. While implicit bias is hard to identify and remedy, this editorial encourages international legal practitioners and scholars to diversify their own experiences and engage in the imagination of counter-stereotypes.

This article is part of the ongoing efforts to write a critical history of international arbitration in commercial and investment matters. It examines the ways in which the Spanish crown and its concessionaries set up a mechanism to settle legal disputes pertaining to the transatlantic slave trade. The transformation of asientos de negros from limited royal contracts to large-scale monopolies awarded to foreign chartered companies during the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was accompanied by the creation of an international commercial arbitration system. Why was this system set up, how did it work, and what was its faith? The overall aim of the article is to invite international lawyers to rethink the history of international arbitration and pay closer attention to the ‘private’ dimensions of formal and informal imperialism. It also attempts to bridge the historical investigation and contemporary commentary. In the conclusion, I argue that this study allows us, in a mirroring effect, to question the idea that today's dispute settlement mechanism was conceived as a means to ‘depoliticize’ international investment law. What the introduction of arbitration achieves is to place some fundamental questions out of sight. Today, as in the past, arbitrators work from within the system; their work rests on a series of unspoken – and yet highly political – premises about the organization of economic life and the distribution of values.

An increasing number of international law scholars over the last few years have started to turn their attention to the study of political economy. To what extent can this trend be considered an indication of an underlying ‘disciplinary turn’? How should one understand the phenomenon of disciplinary turns? The answer we propose to this question in this article proceeds from the assumption that not all disciplinary shifts follow the same logic. Unlike the linguistic or the historical turn, the turn to political economy in contemporary international law does not represent an exercise in inter-disciplinary exploration. The concept of political economy used in international law has very little to do with the actual discipline of political economy. It is much more diffuse and unfocused in theoretical terms. What gives it its essential sense of identity is not any form of distinct methodological orientation, but rather its basic usefulness as a potential marker of critical self-distancing vis-à-vis the mainstream international law tradition and its ideological function as a mediating device for the expression of a deep-seated concern about the structural injustices of modern capitalism.

Hunger and food insecurity are viewed as global problems, requiring global responses. Even though there is no distinct field of ‘international food law’, many areas of international law in some way deal with issues related to global hunger and food insecurity. Hunger and food insecurity are immensely complex problems that cannot possibly be understood and addressed through an inherently limited disciplinary perspective. This article argues that food regime theory – an analytical tool developed and used mostly in the field of sociology – can provide a useful means through which to better lay bare the role of international law in constituting global food relations. If international lawyers are serious about contributing to reducing global hunger and realizing food security, it is imperative to situate international law and its specialized fields within the broader political economy of food.

The late critical geographer Brian Harley forewarned that modern cartography had come to control and even ‘imprison’ spatial understandings of the earth. Where does this leave international lawyers when they encounter a quintessential ‘World Map’? Quite bluntly: tied to an inscriptive institution that has embodied the modern legibility and visualization of earth space. When speaking about the global arrangements of economic and political power constituted through law, what emerges, therefore, is the need for an expanded spatial literacy among international lawyers that critically engages the graphic legacy and influence of the geometric map. To enhance that literacy, I reach beyond the doctrinal field to engage a powerful spatial critique that has thus far encompassed scholarship across geography, international relations (IR) and sociology. A critique that took impetus over 20 years ago with John Agnew's assertion that modern social science had become captured by a ‘territorial trap’. The article attempts to enrich that critique with Mark Salter's insight on material power, Marshall McLuhan's emphasis on the medium of communication, and Bruno Latour's critique of cartographic naturalism. Specifically, I introduce the concept of cartogenesis as a way of underlining the deeper legacy and consequence of modern cartography, and specifically how the map medium should be grasped as a historical actant that has inscribed a particular ‘ground map’ of international authority. Lastly, the article looks at how geometric mapping now confronts new inscriptive ordering in the forms of transnational lists and contracts, which assert a growing scale of authority over earth space to an extent not seen since the Mercator Projection was recognized as an overriding geographic model.

At the heart of the constitutional theory of money is the argument that money is central to governance. This article explores the ways in which the core mechanism of the publicly undergirded monetary system, involving the incentivization and disciplining of private investors in the money creation process, creates its ‘fiscal value’ and generates both power struggles and possible instability in the unit of account. This twin dynamic of power and instability is intrinsic to a longue durée analysis of money. It is argued that since the current jural relations allocate money and power in particular ways, the basis is created for potential future political challenges to the status quo ante, thereby creating instability. Further, the article emphasizes the centrality of the indeterminacy criterion which is at the core of the critical legal studies (CLS) framework, and its intimate connection to Keynes's notion of uncertainty. The indeterminacy/uncertainty nexus is used to explore how currency stability is determined or undermined by expectations, power struggles, tax contestations, and broader policy frameworks. Finally, the article relates this monetary theory to the literature on state-led industrialization and shows how such a constitutional money theory of industrialization is an alternative to the New Institutionalist perspective which emphasizes the centrality of ‘clear and well-defined’ property and contracts in order to create an ‘efficient’ economy.

It is by now uncontroversial that states may owe human rights obligations to individuals outside their territory. The debate about extraterritoriality has, so far, focused on the concept and interpretation of jurisdiction. The role of territory in general, and title in particular, in the conceptual landscape has received less attention in comparison. This article aims to fill this gap by showing that (a) title to territory continues to shape interpretations of jurisdiction, and (b) that this should be avoided. To this end, the article first defines jurisdiction in international human rights law and title to territory. Jurisdiction is best understood as a threshold criterion that triggers human rights obligations of states towards particular individuals. Title to territory, on the other hand, is a set of claims to territory designed to uphold minimal stability. The article then introduces three models – the approximation model, the differentiation model, and the separation model – of the relationship between title to territory and jurisdiction in international human rights law and evaluates them in light of their fit with the relational nature of human rights. The result is that the approximation and differentiation models – that is, those that maintain title's influence on the interpretation of jurisdiction in various degrees – fail the success criterion, while the separation model satisfies it.

This article argues that understanding the role of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or the Court) to be that of a guardian of discourse would respect legitimate disagreement among pluralist democracies, while enabling the Court to safeguard human rights in a meaningful and effective way.

From the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or the Convention) and the Court's jurisprudence, three basic standards of review can be distilled: First, wherever the Convention's requirements are sufficiently concrete, the Court holds contracting states to well-established standards. Second, when applying broad, abstract and relative Convention rights, the Court safeguards the practical rationality of a democratic decision-making discourse under the rule of law – a substantive review standard that is influenced by procedural factors. Third, the Court also needs to check the facts underlying the case, in order to render its control effective.

By setting ‘soft’ precedent in the form of factors that guide future decision-making without entirely prejudging it, and by taking into account second-order reasons concerning its legitimacy to intervene, the Court is acting as a second player in states’ decision-making discourse. Its task is not to replace the institutions originally responsible for taking the decision, but to ensure that they conform to their own role.

The dynamic of the secondary market for sovereign debt has been affected by the presence of a peculiar category of holders: vulture funds. These funds, specializing in purchasing the debt of sovereign states in distress at a discounted market price, stay aloof from restructuring processes and then enforce their claims in courts to secure the face value. For low revenue debtor countries, paying the claims may involve reducing the resources available for basic services to the population. For very poor countries this also involves a significant regression in terms of development. Against this background, the purpose of this work is to inquire whether and to what extent there exists a rule permitting the suspending and rescheduling of payments so as to pay dues without impairing services. In order to find such a rule, inquiry is to be made into general norms: necessity and public policy. It is under the umbrella of the truly international public policy that the duty of a state to provide certain basic services to its population can be subsumed and the corollary of the suspension and rescheduling of these payments consistently with this duty can be applied.

This article considers the approach to the res judicata principle taken by the International Court of Justice (ICJ or the Court) and, specifically, its application in its 2016 judgment on preliminary objections in the latest dispute between Nicaragua and Colombia. The judgment joins the small number of ICJ decisions in which the Court was evenly split, an altogether rare situation, which, at the time of the decision, had not occurred since the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion. Intriguingly, such a fracture seems to have been prompted by differences over the operation of a procedural principle the understanding of which is comparatively uncontroversial. Upon closer analysis, however, the disagreement reveals that more significant questions were at stake, with members of the minority issuing a vocal joint dissent and several individual declarations. This study will move in three parts: first, it will provide an overview of the nature and purpose of the principle of res judicata, its application in international adjudication, and its use by the ICJ; second, it will analyze the Court's reading of the principle in the case at issue; third, it will expose the broader implications of one such approach for the role and authority of the World Court and the international judiciary.

International human rights law (IHRL), international humanitarian law (IHL) and international criminal law (ICL) have trouble staying faithful to the two pillars of customary international law – state practice and opinio juris. In ICL, the Tadić Interlocutory Appeal on Jurisdiction and the Kupreškić Trial Judgement have even gone as far as enunciating new models to identify customs. In this article, I show that the approaches to customs’ identification postulated in these two cases were conflict-avoidance techniques used by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to bring together IHRL and IHL. The crux of the matter in the Tadić and Kupreškić cases was that the human rights of the victims of war crimes committed in internal conflicts required that a new approach to customary international law be adopted. Thus, the criminal aspect of IHL (i.e., ICL) was updated, and conceptual conflicts between IHL and IHRL were avoided.