International 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.
Self-Protection in World Society: Reformulating the Protective Principle in International Law
Aggressive applications of extraterritoriality under the protective principle in international law pose serious threats to states and individuals. This Note tracks the rise of protective-principle jurisdiction around the world. It then provides a reformulation of the principle to better cabin it within foundational doctrines of international law.
Disenrollment as Citizenship Revocation: Promoting Tribal Sovereignty by Embracing International Norms
This Note argues that Indian tribes can best address disenrollment by viewing the problem through the lens of international norms regarding citizenship revocation. In choosing to embrace these norms, tribes can restrict disenrollment in a manner that does not simply invoke tribal sovereignty but instead promotes it.
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.
When the Sovereign Contracts: Troubling the Public/Private Distinction in International Law
The distinction between a state’s public and private acts is flimsy and unclear. Choosing to see an act as essentially private or public often obscures the other features that complicate that characterization. And selectively recognizing the private aspects of transactions has disproportionately subordinated Global South nations.
COVID-19’s New Cosmopolitanism? Structural Considerations for the Proposed Pandemic Treaty
This Note examines the World Health Organization’s current efforts to create a novel pandemic treaty as a potential turning point in global health law. COVID-19 shocked the status quo, but this Note argues that normative shift effectuated through specific treaty structures could ensure the world does better in another pandemic.
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.
Not Hers Alone: Victim Standing Before the CEDAW Committee After M.W. v. Denmark
This Note argues that the CEDAW Committee should embrace and expand on its admissibility decision in M.W. v. Denmark, in which the Committee granted victim standing to a male child, by allowing any individual to allege CEDAW violations without restriction on the basis of sex, gender, or gender identity.
Spinning Secrets: The Dangers of Selective Declassification
Presidents often engage in what this Note calls selective declassification: the practice of declassifying documents that help advance a presidential agenda while keeping conflicting documents secret. This Note shows how selective declassification distorts public perceptions and policy choices, and offers reforms to mitigate these harms.
State of the Art: How Cultural Property Became a National-Security Priority
Until recently, the United States did little to help repatriate looted antiquities, thanks to a powerful coalition of art collectors, museums, and numismatists who preferred an unregulated art market. This Essay explores how the United States came to treat the protection of cultural property as an important national-security issue.
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.
Privacy and Security Across Borders
This Essay analyzes the impetus and results of recent initiatives by the United States, European Union, and Australia to regulate law enforcement access to data, highlights their promise and their limits, and offers a way forward that protects speech, privacy, and other rights in the process.
Sovereign Difference and Sovereign Deference on the Internet
This Response to Andrew Woods makes two points. First, it shows why the “fragmentation” charge frequently levied against sovereignty-based approaches to internet governance is misplaced. Second, it questions the efficacy of Woods’s normative theory of judicial comity.
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.
The Treaty Problem: Understanding the Framers’ Approach to International Legal Commitments
Bond v. United States failed to answer important questions about the scope and limits of the treaty power. This Comment highlights an underexplored factor driving the Framers’ formulation of that power—the threat of war inherent in all treaty violations—and its implications for Bond’s lingering questions.
Presidential Power to Terminate International Agreements
Can President Trump unilaterally withdraw the United States from any and all international agreements to which the United States is a party? This Essay argues that constitutional, functional, and comparative-law considerations dictate that the answer is a resounding “no.”