Recent Submissions

  • Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today

    Pershing, Abigail D.
    SpaceX plans to have its first astronauts land on Mars by 2026. Blue Origin wants to take tourists to space by April 2019. The European Space Agency points to the possibilities of mining Helium-3 on the moon to provide cleaner energy here on Earth. Space tourism, exploration, and exploitation are very real possibilities in the near future—at least technologically. Legally, however, the way forward is less clear.
  • Beyond Fragmentation: On International Law's Integrationist Forces

    Megiddo, Tamar
    What is a country to do when international law presents it with two conflicting yet binding norms? This question has been haunting international law scholars for the past two decades. It has arisen with particular fervor in the context of the proliferation of international legal regimes and, specifically, international tribunals since the 1990s.
  • What is a War Crime?

    Hathaway, Oona A.; Strauch, Paul K.; Walton, Beatrice A.; Weinberg, Zoe A. Y.
    What is a war crime? The question appears to have a simple answer: a war crime is a violation of the law of war. But do all violations of the law of war qualify as war crimes? And are all war crimes violations of the law of war? These questions are not new. In 1942, Hersch Lauterpacht, a leading international lawyer who assisted the prosecution of the Nazis for war crimes at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, wrote a memo in which he asked, “Is there a definition of war crimes?” More than seven decades later, the answer to his question remains unsettled.
  • Foreign Affairs in Court: Lessons from CJEU Targeted Sanctions Jurisprudence

    Chachko, Elena
    There are many myths about the role of courts in foreign affairs and national security in Western democracies. Traditionally, courts and scholars in different jurisdictions have taken the view that executive action related to foreign affairs has unique attributes, making it ill-suited for review by unelected judges with limited institutional competence.1 This approach has relied on a combination of functional considerations and concerns about the democratic legitimacy of judicial interference with inherently political foreign and security policies.