International Law

This Piece operates at the intersection of comparative environmental law and legal history. It introduces a novel distinction between two paradigms of technology-based pollution standards: the first, uniform across all places and environmental conditions, and the second, tailored to local environmental and economic circumstances. It then compares the air pollution regimes of the United States and the European Union with an eye to the relative place...

The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination. This Article introduces Nakba as a legal concept to resolve this tension. Meaning “Catastrophe” in Arabic, the term “al-Nakba” (النكبة) is often...

Climate-change–induced sea-level rise threatens the very existence of Small Island Developing States. Not only will this crisis create extreme climate conditions that can physically devastate these states, it also threatens their place in the international legal system. For a country to gain or maintain access to the international legal system, it needs to be classified as a “state.” The common understanding is that a state needs to have...

This Essay is the first scholarly intervention, from any discipline, to examine the number and nature of asylum claims made by U.S. citizens, and to explore the broader implications of this phenomenon. While the United States continues to be a preeminent destination for persons seeking humanitarian protection, U.S. citizens have fled the country in significant numbers, filing approximately 14,000 asylum claims since 2000. By formally seeking refuge...

International human rights law is often associated with the progressive expansion of justice and freedom. But that link cannot be taken for granted. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is attempting to transform human rights into an instrument of twenty-first century global authoritarianism. This Note seeks to fill a significant lacuna in the literature by focusing on China’s efforts at the regional, national, and subnational levels to socialize...

In early 2018, North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump were not on the best of terms, publicly lash­ing out at each other and threatening the destruction of the other’s state. And yet, within the year they were smiling and handshaking in Singapore, followed not long after by a second summit in Vietnam. These summits, focused on the prospect of North Korea’s denuclearization, have in fact raised important...

Courts and commentators have long struggled to reconcile promi­nent federalism doctrines with the text of the Constitution. These doc­trines include state sovereign immunity, the anticommandeering doc­trine, and the equal sovereignty of the States. Supporters of such doctrines have generally relied on the history, structure, and purpose of the Constitution rather than its text. Critics have charged that the doctrines lack adequate support in...

The Supreme Court’s 2018 Jesner v. Arab Bank, PLC decision caused uncertainty for future and ongoing Alien Tort Statute (ATS) litigation in federal courts. In holding that foreign corporations are not subject to liability under the ATS, the Court foreclosed one avenue hu­man rights plaintiffs have sought to use for the past few decades to garner attention, and in some cases receive significant monetary settle­ments, for the abuses. Further,...

For a state to lawfully use force in anticipation of a cyber attack, the prospective attack must rise to the level of an “armed attack” under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, and it must be “imminent.” While there is broad agreement that some cyber attacks will satisfy Article 51’s “armed attack” requirement, the question of how to evaluate whether such an attack is “imminent”—based on an analysis of the technology...