Human Rights Law
The Dangerous Rise of “Dual-Use” Objects in War
Militaries are increasingly targeting “dual-use objects”—objects that serve both civilian and military purposes. Drawing on an original dataset of the U.S. military’s airstrike reports and ground reporting in Iraq and Syria, this Article illustrates how targeting such "dual-use objects" has undermined critical legal protections for civilians.
The Church’s Treaties: How the Holy See Makes and Shapes International Law
The Catholic Church has concluded close to two hundred treaties in the last sixty years with nations across the globe. Many of these agreements integrate Church doctrine into state legal systems at the expense of LGBTQ rights. This Note unearths this vast treaty regime—and suggests ways to challenge it.
Living with History: Will the Alien Tort Statute Become a Badge of Shame or Badge of Honor?
This Essay considers the 2021 Supreme Court ruling in Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe to interrogate the importance of U.S. nationality in future Alien Tort Statute jurisdictional analysis, offering that the Supreme Court can still bring ATS jurisprudence back in line with history on the question of U.S.-actor liability.
Seeking Justice: The State of Transnational Corporate Accountability
As communities harmed by multinational companies traverse the globe in search of remedy, they face diverse legal systems that are historically ill-equipped to meet their needs. This Essay explores the current legal context for such efforts in Global North jurisdictions and suggests some new and underutilized avenues for recourse.
Utilizing Foreign Legal Assistance Actions to Promote Corporate Accountability for Human-Rights Abuses
This Essay discusses some of the challenges that may arise during transnational human-rights litigation against multinational corporations in U.S. courts. To complement these efforts, the author suggests utilizing the foreign legal assistance statute to strengthen human-rights cases promoting corporate accountability abroad.
Climate Change and Challenges to Self- Determination: Case Studies from French Polynesia and the Republic of Kiribati
This Essay examines effects of climate change and related phenomena on self-determination through two case studies. The case of French Polynesia highlights effects on people’s right to freely dispose of their natural resources. The case of the Republic of Kiribati demonstrates how a defeatist narrative of such effects undermines sovereignty.
The Multiple Selves of Economic Self-Determination
This Essay contends that dyadic understandings of economic self-determination, formed in light of earlier anticolonial struggles, are no longer sufficient. It argues instead for a plural and flexible conception, centered on a broader vision of the economic “self,” that more accurately reflects sources of economic constraint in the contemporary world.
The Tragedy and Promise of Self-Determination
The principle of self-determination, like Janus, has two faces: negative and positive. Often understood as enabling the fracture of states into national components, the principle is better seen as facilitating the creation of multinational frameworks that foster toleration and human rights.
Monuments to the Confederacy and the Right to Destroy in Cultural-Property Law
The recent protests over Confederate memorials illustrate a gap in cultural-property law. Because cultural-property law presses inexorably toward preservation, it has no framework for addressing when a nation might be justified in destroying its own cultural property. This Note provides a framework for permitting the destruction of monuments that celebrate a violation of international human rights law.
When Stopping the Smuggler Means Repelling the Refugee: International Human Rights Law and the European Union's Operation To Combat Smuggling in Libya’s Territorial Sea
Science and Harm in Human Rights Cases: Preventing the Revictimization of Families of the Disappeared
Antislavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law
117 Yale L.J. 550 (2008). Between 1817 and 1871, bilateral treaties between Britain and several other countries (eventually including the United States) led to the establishment of international courts for the suppression of the slave trade. Though all but forgotten today, these antislavery courts were the first international human rights courts. Over the lifespan of the treaties, the courts heard more than 600 cases and freed almost 80,000 slaves found aboard illegal slave trading vessels. During their peak years of operation, the courts heard cases that may have involved as many as one out of every five or six ships involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Historians have given these international antislavery courts scant attention, and legal scholars have almost completely ignored the courts. Most legal scholars view international courts and international human rights law as largely a post-World War II phenomenon, with the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals as the seminal moment in the turn to international law as a mechanism for protecting individual rights. But in fact, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the nineteenth-century slavery abolition movement was the first successful international human rights campaign, and international treaties and courts were its central features. The history of the antislavery courts also reveals a more complex interrelationship between state power, moral ideas, and domestic and international legal institutions than many contemporary theories of international law and relations acknowledge. Moreover, the antislavery movement’s use of international law and legal institutions as part of a broader social, political, and military strategy can help us better understand the potential role of international law today in bringing about improvements in human rights.
