Law-Making Treaties: Form and Function in International Law

AbstractThis article concentrates on a particular controversy during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa; the mass cancellation of flights to and from affected countries. This occurred despite authoritative advice against such restrictions from the World Health Organization (WHO). During a public health emergency such as Ebola, the airplane sits at a site of regulatory uncertainty as it falls within the scope of two specialist and overlapping domains of international law; the WHO International Health Regulations (2005) and the Convention on International Civil Aviation. We explore how legal technicalities and objects, by promoting functional interactions between these two specialized regimes of law, were utilized to deal with this uncertainty. We show how the form and function of these mundane tools had a significant impact; assimilating aviation further into the system of global health security as well as instrumentalizing the aircraft as a tool of disease surveillance. This encounter of regimes was law creating, resulting in new international protocols and standards designed to enable the resumption of flights in and out of countries affected by outbreaks. This article therefore offers significant and original insights into the hidden work performed by legal techniques and tools in dealing with regime overlap. Our findings contribute to the wider international law literature on fragmentation and enrich our understanding of the significance of relational regime interactions in international law.

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Specialized Courts and Tribunals as the Guardians of International Law? The Nature and Function of Judicial Interpretation in Kelsen and Schmitt

10.1093/oso/9780198816423.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jochen von Bernstorff

Keyword(s):

International Law ◽

World Order ◽

Judicial Interpretation ◽

International Courts ◽

Specialized Courts ◽

Current Concerns ◽

And Function ◽

Law Making

Jochen von Bernstorff identifies the several roles and functions of international courts and tribunals (ICs) from the perspective of Hans Kelsen’s and Carl Schmitt’s accounts of international law. Kelsen saw the international judiciary with compulsory adjudication and de facto law-making authority as the key to a future peaceful world order. This would not require a world legislator. He also held that judges had considerable freedom in their interpretation and application of international law. Schmitt agreed that courts have a central law-making function, and also that judges are subject to few interpretative constraints. But Kelsen and Schmitt were not writing with today’s sector-specific international courts in mind. Much current concerns about the legitimacy of ICs can be traced back to tensions with what could be claimed to represent a global judicial imperialism. Von Bernstorff warns against sectorial colonization in the sense that the specialized ICs take control over non-judicialized sectors.

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Form and Function in the Institutionalisation of International Law

The Institutional Problem in Modern International Law ◽

10.5040/9781474203142.ch-008 ◽

2016 ◽

Keyword(s):

International Law ◽

Form And Function ◽

And Function

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Jurisprudential Schizophrenia: On Form and Function in Islamic Finance

10.31228/osf.io/aqrsy ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Haider Ala Hamoudi

Keyword(s):

Social Justice ◽

International Law ◽

Islamic Finance ◽

Muslim Community ◽

Form And Function ◽

The Past ◽

Large Numbers ◽

Alternative Means ◽

And Function ◽

Functional Purpose

7 Chicago Journal of International Law 605 (2007)Despite its explosive growth over the past several decades, Islamic finance continues to have trouble attracting large numbers of otherwise pious Muslims as potential investors. The underlying reason for this is that the means that the practice employs to circumvent some of the central Muslim bans relating to finance (most notably, the ban on interest) are entirely formal in their structure and are equivalent to conventional structures both legally and economically. However, the practice purports to serve functional ends; namely, through offering Muslims alternative means of finance that are intended to further Islamic ideals of fairness and social justice. This has resulted in schizophrenia within Islamic finance, with proponents and practitioners creating formalisms to comply with Shari'a while continuing to insist that Islamic finance has a functional purpose that cannot sensibly be ascribed to it given its current structure. Either Islamic finance needs to describe itself as nothing more or less than the mere conformity with doctrine in a manner that does not serve any functional purpose at all, or, given the interest of the Muslim community in social justice in economic affairs, the practice needs to reinvent itself, focusing less on mimicking conventional alternatives and more on achieving at least to some degree the ends of social justice and fairness it endlessly promotes.

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UN Convention on State Immunity: Form and Function

International and Comparative Law Quarterly ◽

10.1093/iclq/lei088 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 55 (2) ◽

pp. 407-410 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Richard Gardiner

Keyword(s):

International Law ◽

Customary Law ◽

Vienna Convention ◽

Form And Function ◽

National Courts ◽

State Immunity ◽

Adoption And Implementation ◽

The Law ◽

And Function ◽

Number Of Parties

The eventual product of the International Law Commission's (ILC) work on state immunity hasbeen in the form of a Convention. This prompts the question whether widespread ratification (or accession etc) will be necessary for clear rules of international law on state immunity to become firmlyestablished or whether a substantial codifying effect could be achieved even if the Convention does not attract a great number of parties. The latter has sometimes been said of much of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. As the law on state immunity has undergone much of its substantial development by practice of national courts (albeit that the piecemeal adoption and implementation of treaties has played some part), could this process not simply continue with the Convention providing guidance or a model? If the trend from absolute to restrictive immunity could occur by development of customary law, are there not still adequate means of consolidating customary law without the need for states actually to become parties to the treaty?

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Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) of DNA and RNA

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100152148 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 47 ◽

pp. 34-35

Author(s):

Patricia G. Arscott ◽

Gil Lee ◽

Victor A. Bloomfield ◽

D. Fennell Evans

Keyword(s):

Molecular Structures ◽

Inorganic Materials ◽

Resolving Power ◽

Scanning Tunneling ◽

Tunneling Microscopy ◽

Form And Function ◽

Dna And Rna ◽

Calf Thymus ◽

And Function ◽

The Relationship

STM is one of the most promising techniques available for visualizing the fine details of biomolecular structure. It has been used to map the surface topography of inorganic materials in atomic dimensions, and thus has the resolving power not only to determine the conformation of small molecules but to distinguish site-specific features within a molecule. That level of detail is of critical importance in understanding the relationship between form and function in biological systems. The size, shape, and accessibility of molecular structures can be determined much more accurately by STM than by electron microscopy since no staining, shadowing or labeling with heavy metals is required, and there is no exposure to damaging radiation by electrons. Crystallography and most other physical techniques do not give information about individual molecules.We have obtained striking images of DNA and RNA, using calf thymus DNA and two synthetic polynucleotides, poly(dG-me5dC)·poly(dG-me5dC) and poly(rA)·poly(rU).

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