Essential for students and scholars in politics and law, Pelc provides a comprehensive account of the politics of treaty flexibility.

Essential for students and scholars in politics and law, Pelc provides a comprehensive account of the politics of treaty flexibility.

International law shapes nearly every aspect of our lives. It affects the food we eat, the products we buy, the rights we hold, and the wars we fight. Yet international law is often believed to be the exclusive domain of well-heeled professionals with years of legal training. This text uses clear, accessible writing and contemporary political examples to explain where international law comes from, how actors decide whether to follow international law, and how international law is upheld using legal and political tools. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, this book is accessible to a wide audience and is written for anyone who wants to understand how global rules shape and transform international politics. Each chapter is framed by a case study that examines a current political issue, such as the bombing of Yemen or the use of chemical weapons in Syria, encouraging students to draw connections between theoretical concepts and real-world situations. The chapters are modular and self-contained, and each is paired with multiple Supplemental Cases: edited and annotated judicial opinions. Accompanied by ready-to-use PowerPoint slides and a testbank for instructors.

There are twenty-nine Islamic law states (ILS) in the world today, and their Muslim population is over 900 million. Muslims in these countries--and, to some extent, all Muslims--are ethically, morally, doctrinally, or politically committed to the Islamic legal tradition, a unique logic and culture of justice based on nonconfrontational dispute resolution. In Islamic Law and International Law, Emilia Justyna Powell examines the differences and similarities between the Islamic legal tradition and international law, focusing in particular on the issue of conflict management and resolution. In many Islamic Law States, Islamic law displaces secular law in state governance and shapes these countries' international dealings. Powell considers why some of Islamic Law States accept international courts while others avoid them, stressing throughout that we cannot make blanket claims about such states. Each relationship is context-specific, hinging on the nature of the domestic legal system. Moreover, not all of these states are Islamic to the same degree or in the same way. Secular law and religious law fuse in different ways in different domestic legal systems. Often, the Islamic legal tradition points in one direction, while the Western-based, secularized international law points in another. However, Powell argues that Islamic legal tradition contains elements that are compatible with modern international law. She marshals original data on the legal systems structures in thirty Islamic Law States over the entire course of the post-World War Two era, and she draws from in-depth interviews with Islamic law scholars and leading practitioners of international law, including judges of the International Court of Justice. Rich in empirical evidence, this book will reshape how we think about the relationship between ILS and the international system.

There is no issue more central to a legal order than responsibility, and yet the dearth of contemporary theorizing on international responsibility law is worrying for the state of international law. The volume brings philosophers of the law of responsibility into dialogue with international responsibility law specialists. Its tripartite structure corresponds to the three main theoretical challenges in the contemporary practice of international responsibility law: the public and private nature of the international responsibility of public institutions; its collective and individual dimensions; and the place of fault therein. In each part, two international lawyers and two philosophers of responsibility law address the most pressing questions in the theory of international responsibility law. The volume closes with a comparative 'world tour' of the responsibility of public institutions in four different legal cultures and regions, identifying stepping-stones and stumbling blocks on the path towards a common law of international responsibility.

This book provides innovative and empirically based insights into the ongoing debate on the fragmentation of international trade law. It offers the reader a much-needed doctrinal overview of the different approaches to the issue of fragmentation and reveals their inherent methodological advantages and limitations. On this basis, the book then approaches the issue of fragmentation from an empirical standpoint by applying a novel dataset on Preferential Trade Agreements’ Dispute Settlement Mechanisms (PTA-DSMs), which have been used to adjudicate general exception clauses within the context of the individual PTA Members’ obligation to liberalize trade in goods. Although the results remain limited to the single issue of PTA-DSM adjudication for liberalization of trade in goods, they are indicative of key misconceptions regarding the fragmentation of ITL. As the findings confirm, the PTA-DSMs assessed have ultimately come to equivalent decisions, taking into consideration their overall use, the nature of the legal commitments embedded in the respective PTAs, and the economic wellbeing of the respective PTA partners. The book reveals the influence of specific PTA-DSMs on other PTA-DSMs and thereby paves the way for legal unification, rather than fragmentation.

The post-Cold War era has seen an unprecedented move towards more legalization in international cooperation and a growth of third-party dispute settlement systems. WTO panels, the Appellate Body and investor-state dispute settlement cases have received increasing attention beyond the core trade and investment constituencies within governments. Scrutiny by business, civil society, academia, and trade and investment experts has been on the rise. This book asks whether we observe a transformation or a demise of existing institutions and mechanisms to adjudicate disputes over trade or investment. It makes a contribution to the question in which direction international economic dispute settlement is heading in times of change, uncertainty and increasing economic nationalism. In order to do so, it brings together chapters written by leading researchers and experts in law and political science to address the challenges of settling disputes in the global economy and to sketch possible scenarios ahead of us.

This book explores how the law of treaty withdrawal operates. Many commentators have observed a wider sense of crisis in international law as governments of different ideological stripes withdraw or threaten to withdraw from international organisations and treaties. There are different political forces behind all of these cases, but they all use the same basic device in international law – a treaty withdrawal clause. This book focuses on withdrawal clauses within multilateral treaties, providing a detailed overview of their operation, drawing on a range of case studies including Brexit, nuclear weapons treaties and investment arbitration agreements. The obligations a withdrawal clause places on a withdrawing state help regulate the withdrawal process, providing a notional form of stability. Using insights from international relations theory and legal theory, this book unpacks how and why the law of withdrawal operates and what its limitations are.

In Global Constitutionalism and the Path of International Law, Surendra Bhandari succinctly offers an account of the most important growth and features of international law from the perspectives of global constitutionalism. The author examines the concept from its constitutive features and the operative standards or modus operandi. These two aspects offer a new and innovative methodology in explicating the theory of ‘global constitutionalism’. By examining three cases: international trade (WTO), human rights, and the role of Security Council, the author demonstrates how the idea of global constitutionalism is shaping and deepening the path of international law in the 21st century and elucidates the development of international law as a body of positive rules.

Unrivalled coverage of IR theories from leading experts, featuring a new chapter that reflects on the historic marginalisation of global IR and a wide range of case studies that show readers how theory can be applied to address concrete political problems.