Category: 2017

Ashley S. Deeks. This article sets out to describe and defend—with certain qualifications—the use of secret commitments in contemporary practice, with a focus on those to which the United States is a party. Secret commitments should not always be viewed with suspicion and hostility. Notwithstanding their opacity, these commitments perform a critical role in shaping legal and strategic interactions between the United States and other states. Further, the evidence belies the idea that states predominately resort to secrecy when they intend to violate international norms. Most of those commitments that have come to light are—counter-intuitively, perhaps—consistent with the U.N. Charter,…

Daniel Bodansky. Since the emergence of the international climate change regime in the early 1990s, frustration with the slow pace of the negotiations has bubbled over from time to time in proposals to address climate change through international adjudication.1 I was involved in one such episode two decades ago, as part of a team of international lawyers researching the claims that small island states might bring for climate change damages. A dozen years later, the idea of climate change litigation was revived by the Pacific island state of Palau, which proposed that the United Nations General Assembly request an advisory…

Gabriella Blum. By restricting the permissible justifications for war and excluding all tangible benefits from the permissible goals of war, replacing both with an amorphous, however seemingly narrow interest in “defense,” those clear yardsticks have been lost. As a result, we no longer have a clear metric of success that marks the sufficiency of the force used: there is no recognizable moment in which the war has achieved its legitimate goals. Victory can no longer be measured by concrete benefits but only by the absence of concrete harms. And an absence is hard to prove. Modern wars, as a consequence,…