Social Power and the Politics of Reservations and Objections in Human Rights Treaties

States often file reservations to human rights treaties with the goal of reducing their legal commitments under the treaty. Other states within the treaty have the right to declare objections in response to states making reservations. This is a potentially powerful tool for objecting states, and has numerous consequences for relations within and outside the human rights institution. So why do only some states lodge formal objections, while others do not? We argue that states consider the degree of social power they wield over a reserving state when formulating the decision to lodge an objection, because higher levels of social power amplify the effects of an objection. To evaluate our expectation, we gather data on all states’ reserving and objecting behaviors within the Convention against Torture. Controlling for a number of factors, we find that the measure of social power significantly increases the likelihood that a state will object to another state's reservation. This research calls attention to the power of objections as a legal tool, and suggests areas of future research for the effects of objections on the legality of human rights agreements.

Law, Empire, and the Sultan

This book is the first study of late Ḥanafism in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It examines Ottoman imperial authority in authoritative Ḥanafī legal works from the Ottoman world of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries CE, casting new light on the understudied late Ḥanafī jurists (al-mutaʾakhkhirūn). By taking the madhhab and its juristic discourse as the central focus and introducing “late Ḥanafism” as a framework of analysis, this study demonstrates that late Ḥanafī jurists assigned probative value and authority to the orders and edicts of the Ottoman sultan. This authority is reflected in the sultan’s ability to settle juristic disputes, to order specific opinions to be adopted in legal opinions (fatāwā), and to establish his orders as authoritative and final reference points. The incorporation of sultanic orders into authoritative Ḥanafī legal commentaries, treatises, and fatwā collections was made possible by a shift in Ḥanafī legal commitments that embraced sultanic authority as an indispensable element of the lawmaking process.

Justice in a New World

The wide-ranging chapters of this ambitious volume advance our understanding of how Natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires strained to use the other’s law as a political, strategic, and moral resource. Europeans and Natives appealed to imperfect understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of right. Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their resort to each other’s law. Each misconstrued the other’s legal commitments while learning about them. The contributors explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: how and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically, and morally—to Natives, and vice versa? To address this question, the volume goes beyond existing scholarship, which juxtaposes settlers’ and Natives’ understanding in empire-specific circumstances, by adding another axis of comparison, that between English and Iberian New World empires. Chapters probe such topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of indigenous peoples. Understanding the conflict and transformation of notions of justice and law through a dual comparative study of legal intelligibility is the objective of this volume.

The Politics of Treaty Signature: The Role of Diplomats and Ties that Bind

The literature on international cooperation through legal commitments focuses chiefly on treaty ratification. What has received much less attention is that before states ratify treaties, they commit to treaties through the act of signature. This article addresses this research gap by investigating how a state’s decision to sign a treaty is affected by its diplomatic representation during treaty negotiations. Conceptualizing signature as a commitment step, we argue that participation in treaty negotiations translates into a “ties-that-bind” effect creating incentives for diplomats to support the treaty text leading to treaty signature. Our empirical analysis uses a new data set on signature and tests the argument for 52 multilateral treaties concluded between 1990 and 2005. Results confirm that participation in treaty making matters for signature but not necessarily for ratification.

The Benefits of Civil Litigation

This chapter argues that while litigation is important to the parties to a case, who often seek to recover damages if successful, it is also important to society at large. In particular, civil litigation brings social benefits because litigation is the means through which legal commitments are enforced; litigation gives effect to the rule of law itself. This chapter further argues that the desirable litigation levels are achieved when parties with bona fide legal claims, and only such parties, initiate litigation.

KEKUATAN HUKUM AKTA PERJANJIAN TANPA BEA MATERAI

Legal Commitments in essence is the governing law of interest between individuals. Subject engagement in the modern era, there are all kinds nomenclature attached to a deed of contract. This paper aims to peel around Strength Without Legal Deed Stamp Duty. Functions seal as defined in the law No. 13 is a tax on documents used by the people in the traffic law to prove a situation, the fact and deed that is civil. Submitted written evidence in civil procedure should be affixed with a seal to be used as evidence in court. But this does not mean the absence of the stamp in written evidence causing it unlawful legal act performed, only the deed of legal actions that do not qualify to be used as evidence in court. As for determining the validity of the deed of contract is pursuant to Article 1320 of the Civil Code. Hukum Perikatan pada hakikatnya merupakan hukum yang mengatur tentang kepentingan antara perseorangan. Perihal perikatan di era modern, muncul beragam nomenklatur yang melekat dalam sebuah akta perjanjian. Tulisan ini bertujuan mengupas seputar Kekuatan Hukum Akta Perjanjian Tanpa Bea Materai. Fungsi meterai yang sebagaimana ditegaskan dalam undang-undang No 13 Tahun adalah sebagai pajak atas dokumen yang digunakan masyarakat dalam lalu lintas hukum untuk membuktikan suatu keadaan, kenyataan dan perbuatan yang bersifat perdata. Alat bukti tertulis yang diajukan dalam acara perdata harus dibubuhi meterai agar dapat digunakan sebagai alat bukti pengadilan. Namun hal ini bukan berarti dengan tiadanya materai dalam alat bukti tertulis menyebabkan tidak sahnya perbuatan hukum yang dilakukan, hanya saja akta dari perbuatan hukum yang dilakukan itu tidak memenuhi syarat untuk dapat digunakan sebagai alat bukti pengadilan. Adapun yang menentukan sahnya akta perjanjian adalah sesuai ketentuan Pasal 1320 KUH Perdata.