The Long History of the Regulation of Private Business Corporations in International Law

Veiled Power ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 220-228
Author(s):  
Doreen Lustig
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Private Business ◽  
Business Corporation ◽  
Business Regulation ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of

The conclusion challenges the prevailing narrative on the 1990s as the watershed period during which a new sensibility emerged towards the responsibility of private business corporations as subjects of international legal responsibility. While the prevailing account focuses on the private business corporation as a subject of responsibility, it ignores alternative conceptual frameworks that were central to debates over business regulation in international law such as businesses as participants, monopolies, or multinational corporations (MNCs). Furthermore, this narrative is frequently informed by an implicit historical account on international law’s limited influence (or none at all) on the regulation of private business corporations until the 1990s. Conversely, the conclusion draws on the findings of this book to problematize this narrative of marginality and demonstrates how the supposed marginality of the business enterprise in international law, ingrained as it is in the commonly accepted narrative, is a conceptual bias that facilitated (rather than prevented) the emergence and reach of the private business corporation and legitimized the elements in the international legal order that enabled it to thrive.

Contingencies in International Legal Histories

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-128
Author(s):  
Filipe dos Reis
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Different Origins

This chapter reconstructs how contingency is situated in international legal histories. In particular, it focuses on how contingency relates to narratives of international law’s origin and progress. It explores, first, how traditional and recent international legal histories locate the origin of international law. Different authors—advancing different projects—situate international law within a range of different origins. In the end, the origin of international law is contingent. Moreover, it is possible for some authors, particularly those problematising international law’s Eurocentric origin, to conceptualise the link of contingency and origin not only as the contingency of origin but also in the form of a contingency as origin of international law, as international law originates from the confrontations, translations, encounters, and struggles of various actors. The chapter analyses, second, arguments about progress in international legal histories and argues that these arguments are tied to different conceptualisations of the observer, i.e. the international legal historian. Here, more traditional international legal histories often rely on an understanding of a non-contingent observer, who seeks to create an international legal order that is able to tame the contingencies of the international sphere. However, such narratives of international law’s linear progress have come under scrutiny recently as several interventions started to direct our attention to the multiple perspectives and multilinear trajectories in the making of the current international legal order or invite us to conceptualise the history of international law as a sequence of contingent disruptive events. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of what it could mean to open international legal histories for different conceptualisations of origin and to give up the idea of a non-contingent observer inscribed in progressive narratives.

The Nomadic Sense of Law in an International Constitutionalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-283
Author(s):  
William E. Conklin
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nomadic Communities ◽  
Legal Space ◽  
International Constitutionalism

This article examines the place of Nomadic peoples in an international constitutionalism. The article claims that an important element of a Nomadic culture is its sense of law. Such a sense of law differs from a constitutionalism which has privileged fundamental principles aimed to constrain acts of the executive arm of the State. Such a constitutionalism is shared by many contemporary domestic legal orders. Public international law also takes such a constitutionalism for granted. In the focus upon rules to constrain the executive arm of the State, the sense of law in Nomadic communities has slipped through arguments which the jurist might consider inclusive of the protection of such communities. This problem is nested in a legacy which has weighted down the history of European legal thought. The article initially identifies three forms of nomadism. The social phenomenon of nomadism has been the object of juristic commentary since the Greeks and Romans. The image of Nomadic peoples in such a legacy has imagined Nomadic peoples as lawless although the article argues that a sense of law has existed in such communities. Such a sense of law contradicts a State-centric international legal order. Public international law has reserved a special legal space relating to Nomadic peoples. The article identifies four arguments which might be rendered to protect Nomadic peoples in such a State-centric international community. Problems are raised with each such argument

The Balance of Power in International Law: A History of an Idea

1979 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Vagts ◽  
Detlev F. Vagts
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
International Law ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
World War ◽  
International Policy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of

The existence of a significant relationship between the concept of the balance of power and international law would be regarded as improbable by most modern international lawyers. They would think of the balance as a wholly obsolete conception and, in any case, as a part of international policy, or worse, part of cynical Realpolitik rather than of law. Earlier generations of jurists, however, did see international equilibrium either as an integral part of the system of rules of the law of nations or at least as a necessary precondition to the existence of such a law. Such a view of the interrelationship was never unanimous; indeed, there were in the past many legal observers who saw the balance of power as an obstacle to the development of an international legal order based on something more moral than force alone. This article is devoted to a study of the relationships between those two concepts as seen by the publicists who created the corpus of international law, principally during the period from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It is not a study of the balance of power at large—a topic to which volumes might be dedicated—but only of that idea’s relationship with law.

International Legal Histories as Orders: An Afterword to Martti Koskenniemi’s Foreword

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 1115-1119
Author(s):  
Francesca Iurlaro
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
The Many

Abstract In this article I address the question of what Martti Koskenniemi refers to in his EJIL Foreword as Hugo Grotius’ legal imagination – the type of values he was trying to convey and the strategies he meant to pursue while constructing his idea of an international legal order. As a matter of fact, focusing on such an apparently narrow aspect is not just relevant to those with a historical interest in Grotius. It also tells us something about the inveterate relationship between international law and historiographic practices. What I want to suggest here is that the history of international law is not just an a posteriori critical reflection on the international legal order – a subgenre for lovers of intellectual escapism in search of a distraction from the many problems of the contemporary world – but, rather, that one of the many successful projects of international law was (and still is) the ambition to order the world through histories.

New Approaches to the History of International Law

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 555-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
UPENDRA BAXI
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law

Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0521828929, 356 pp., £60.00 (hb).Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 0521827612, 414 pp., £65.00 (hb).

scholarly journals THE “ENGLISH SCHOOL” OF INTERNATIONAL LAW: SOUNDINGS VIA THE 1972 JUBILEE ESSAYS

2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (S1) ◽  
pp. S126-S153
Author(s):  
Surabhi Ranganathan
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
English School ◽  
The Future ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Anniversary Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law

AbstractAs part of the Cambridge Law Journal's centenary celebrations, this article reads two essays from the journal's 50th anniversary issue. The essays, by Cambridge professors Robert Jennings and Derek Bowett offer resources for the history of international law and its historiography. They shine a light on key debates on the law of the sea at a crucial moment of its development. A close reading of these essays also reveals starting points for new scrutiny of an “English” tradition of international law, including the place of the academy within the tradition, its blueprints for the future of international law and international legal order, and its relation to empire and capitalism.

scholarly journals Fin de NAIL: New Approaches to International Law and its Impact on Contemporary International Legal Scholarship

1997 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Skouteris
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Overwhelming Majority ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Professional Responsibilities ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

Intellectual clashes over the nature of international law have been raging throughout the traceable history of the discipline. Naturalists, positivists, idealists, pragmatists, formalists, realists, and so forth, have striven to put forward and defend credible paradigms of international legal order. The common characteristic of each new wave of criticism has been its unsettling disposition. It arrived stridently with questions and doubts, often seeking reform and often reconceptualization and transcendence. A second common characteristic, notably in the post-enlightenment period, has been the marginalized position of the debate on the merit of each new wave, within and outside legal academia. Indeed, debate over unsettling questions seems to have been exempted from the habitual professional responsibilities of the overwhelming majority of international lawyers. Existential anxieties of this sort have been relinquished to that class of academics usually referred to as jurisprudes or legal theorists. ‘Practicing’ international lawyers, so it is often argued, need not concern themselves with ‘theory’. Their mission is to provide tangible answers to practical problems and, for this task, ‘theoretical’ debate is irrelevant: its outcome is indeterminate, abstract, and, thus, of limited usability. In some cases ‘theoretical’ even becomes a pejorative term, synonymous with counter productive or parasitic.

China and International Adjudication

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Eder
Keyword(s):  
South China Sea ◽  
International Law ◽  
South China ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
International Adjudication

China aims to become a “leader country” in international law that “guides” the international legal order. Delivering the first comprehensive analysis of case law and Chinese academic debates from 2002 to 2018, this book shows that gradually increased engagement with international adjudication is part of a broad effort to consolidate China’s economic and political gains, and regain great power status. It covers trade, investment, territorial and law of the sea matters – including the South China Sea disputes – and delineates a decades-long process between caution and ambition. Both in debate patterns and in actual engagement, this book finds remarkable similarities in all covered fields of law, merely the timetables differ.

scholarly journals Choice and (the Awareness of) its Consequences: The ICJ's “Structural Bias” Strikes Again in the Marshall Islands Case

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 81-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Bianchi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Marshall Islands ◽  
Young Researcher ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Rubber Stamp ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
State Of Affairs

My very first publication, admittedly written in a language that many AJIL Unbound readers might be unable or unwilling to read, was an essay on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and its effects vis-à-vis third parties. Already back then, I found it difficult to justify how an international treaty could rubber-stamp such a highly uneven state of affairs. The overt acknowledgement of the discrimination between nuclear and nonnuclear states, the hypocrisy about “unofficial” nuclear states, and the Article VI obligation for nuclear states to negotiate effective measures of disarmament, largely ignored in the first twenty years of the treaty, were all elements that contributed to my perception of unfairness, if not blatant injustice. As a young researcher approaching international law with the enthusiasm of the neophyte, however, this looked like a little anomaly in an otherwise fair and equitable international legal order. It did not set off warning bells about the system as such. After all, international law was geared, at least in my eyes, towards enhancing the wellbeing of humanity. It must have been so. And it is not that I leaned particularly on the idealistic side; it seemed normal to me … at the time.

Precedent, Compliance, and Change in Customary International Law: An Explanatory Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 108 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre-Hugues Verdier ◽  
Erik Voeten
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Explanatory Theory ◽  
State Behavior ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Vital Element ◽  
Affect State

Customary international law (CIL) is widely recognized as a fundamental source of international law. While its continued significance in the age of treaties was once contested, it is now generally accepted that CIL remains a vital element of the international legal order. Yet CIL is also plagued with conceptual and practical difficulties, which have led critics to challenge its coherence and legitimacy. In particular, critics of CIL have argued that it does not meaningfully affect state behavior. Traditional CIL scholarship is ill equipped to answer such criticism because its objectives are doctrinal or normative—namely, to identify, interpret, and apply CIL rules, or to argue for desirable changes in CIL. For the most part, that scholarship does not propose an explanatory theory in the social scientific sense, which would articulate how CIL works, why states comply, and why and how rules change.

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