scholarly journals To What Scope Does International Law Impact the Way States Behave and Interact with Each Other and Why are International Institutions-Watchdogs of International Law- So Fundamental to the Liberals?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver P. Richmond

‘The institutional peace’ introduces a form of peace that has been influential in the modern era, one that relies on international institutions and law to support the consolidation of a constitutional peace. This type of peace developed as the constitutional version of peace was becoming prominent during the Enlightenment. Institutional peace aims to anchor states within a specific set of values and shared legal context through which they agree on the way to behave. They also agree to police and enforce that behaviour. International law has been crucial for the institutional peace framework to produce a stable international order.


Author(s):  
Shai Dothan

There is a consensus about the existence of an international right to vote in democratic elections. Yet states disagree about the limits of this right when it comes to the case of prisoners’ disenfranchisement. Some states allow all prisoners to vote, some disenfranchise all prisoners, and others allow only some prisoners to vote. This chapter argues that national courts view the international right to vote in three fundamentally different ways: some view it as an inalienable right that cannot be taken away, some view it merely as a privilege that doesn’t belong to the citizens, and others view it as a revocable right that can be taken away under certain conditions. The differences in the way states conceive the right to vote imply that attempts by the European Court of Human Rights to follow the policies of the majority of European states by using the Emerging Consensus doctrine are problematic.


Author(s):  
Gina Heathcote

Reflecting on recent gender law reform within international law, this book examines the nature of feminist interventions to consider what the next phase of feminist approaches to international law might include. To undertake analysis of existing gender law reform and future gender law reform, the book engages critical legal inquiries on international law on the foundations of international law. At the same time, the text looks beyond mainstream feminist accounts to consider the contributions, and tensions, across a broader range of feminist methodologies than has been adapted and incorporated into gender law reform including transnational and postcolonial feminisms. The text therefore develops dialogues across feminist approaches, beyond dominant Western liberal, radical, and cultural feminisms, to analyse the rise of expertise and the impact of fragmentation on global governance, to study sovereignty and international institutions, and to reflect on the construction of authority within international law. The book concludes that through feminist dialogues that incorporate intersectionality, and thus feminist dialogues with queer, crip, and race theories, that reflect on the politics of listening and which are actively attentive to the conditions of privilege from which dominant feminist approaches are articulated, opportunity for feminist dialogues to shape feminist futures on international law emerge. The book begins this process through analysis of the conditions in which the author speaks and the role histories of colonialism play out to define her own privilege, thus requiring attention to indigenous feminisms and, in the UK, the important interventions of Black British feminisms.


Author(s):  
Hannah Woolaver

This chapter explores the interaction between domestic and international law in relation to the state’s engagement with treaties. Treaty engagements are important mechanisms through which states conduct their foreign relations. The domestic allocation of responsibility for the making and unmaking of treaties is therefore a significant question of the constitutional separation of powers in the realm of foreign relations law. Treaties are also international legal instruments, facilitating the development of international law and international institutions. The domestic and international law of treaties therefore both concurrently regulate the state’s power to join and leave treaties. This chapter examines the relationship between these two bodies of law in this regard, setting out developments in domestic jurisdictions establishing constitutional limits on the executive’s power to enter and exit treaties, and addresses the possible impact of these constitutional developments in the international law of treaties.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 258-262
Author(s):  
Anne van Aaken

While Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) prescribe the rules of interpretation for international treaty law as “disciplining rules,” the rules of interpretation themselves are understudied from a cognitive psychology perspective. This is problematic because, as Jerome Frank observed, “judges are incurably human,” like everybody else. I submit that behavioral approaches could provide insights into how biases and heuristics affect the way judges and other interpreters use the VCLT rules.


2012 ◽  
Vol 106 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald McRae

On November 17, 2011, the UN General Assembly elected the members of the International Law Commission for the next five years. In the course of the quinquennium that was completed in August 2011 with the end of the sixty-third session, the Commission concluded four major topics on its agenda: the law of transboundary aquifers, the responsibility of international organizations, the effect of armed conflicts on treaties, and reservations to treaties. It was by any standard a substantial output. The beginning of a new quinquennium now provides an opportunity to assess what the Commission has achieved, to consider the way it operates, and to reflect on what lies ahead for it.


This volume asks a question that is deceptive in its simplicity: Could international law have been otherwise? In other words, what were the past possibilities, if any, for a different law? The search for contingency in international law is often motivated, including in the present volume, by the refusal to accept the present state of affairs and by the hope that recovering possibilities of the past will facilitate a different future. The volume situates the search for contingency theoretically and within many fields of international law, such as human rights and armed conflict, migrants and refugees, the sea and natural resources, and foreign investment and trade. Today there is hardly a serious account that would consider the path of international law to be necessary and that would deny the possibility of a different law altogether. At the same time, however, behind every possibility of the past stands a reason – or reasons – why the law developed as it did. Those who embark in search of contingency soon encounter tensions when they want to recover past possibilities without downplaying patterns of determination and domination. Nevertheless, while warring critical sensibilities may point in different directions, only a keen sense of why things turned out the way they did makes it possible to argue about how they could plausibly have turned out differently.


Author(s):  
Mathew Penelope

This chapter highlights the most fundamental of all obligations owed to refugees—that of non-refoulement. The raison d’être of the obligation continues to provoke debate about the validity of the lines drawn between refugees, other beneficiaries of the obligation, and other migrants, and the way the purported provider of surrogate protection—the State—is implicated in the production of forced migration. That background or deep structure of the State system assists in explaining the phenomenon explored in the chapter: the interaction between shrinking and expansive approaches to non-refoulement. The chapter first outlines the sources of the obligation, noting the obligation’s place in the Refugee Convention and other treaties as well as its status as customary international law, and the corresponding beneficiaries of the obligation. It then examines the scope of the obligation, with emphasis on States’ attempts to divest their responsibilities through legal fictions and extraterritorial immigration enforcement. The chapter also discusses the concept of constructive or disguised refoulement—that is, when an asylum seeker spontaneously leaves the country of asylum as a result of their treatment in that country.


2019 ◽  
pp. 193-224
Author(s):  
Courtenay R. Conrad ◽  
Emily Hencken Ritter

This chapter highlights the conclusions and contributions of theresearch: obligation to international law can constrain leaders from violating human rights-and encourage potential dissidents to revolt against their governments. The argument that human rights treaties "work" is contrary to the explanations of a wide variety of scholars who maintain that the international human rights regime has been an abject failure. Although scholars have found evidence that domestic institutions can lead to decreased repression, there has been little support for the argument that international institutions do so.In contrast, this book finds that-if international law creates even the smallest shift in assumptions over domestic consequences for repressive authorities-these effects can yield a substantively meaningful reduction in rights violations when leaders have significant stakes in domestic conflicts.


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