Legal Theory Blog has named YLJ article Outcasting: Enforcement in Domestic and International Law as its recommended “Download of the Week.” Opinio Juris has also held a symposium on the article, with commentaries from Samantha Besson, Gary Bass, and Michael Helfand, among others. Responses from Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, authors of the article, follow. 

In Outcasting: Enforcement in Domestic and International Law, an article in Issue 2 of Volume 121 of YLJ, Hathaway and Shapiro examine “outcasting,” a nonviolent method of law enforcement that denies the benefits of social cooperation and membership to the disobedient. Hathaway and Shapiro illustrate that outcasting underpins legal regimes from medieval Iceland to the World Trade Organization. The article demonstrates that the traditional critique of international law—that it is not enforced and is therefore not “real” law—ignores the fact that outcasting in international law resembles similar forms of nonviolent enforcement that have sustained a variety of legal regimes for centuries.