John Marshall Law School

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This essay explores the way in which the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has interpreted its personal jurisdiction, particularly the language in its constitutive documents referring to senior leaders and those most responsible. It also compares the approach adopted by the ECCC to the approach ultimately adopted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), which has very similar language in its constitutive documents.

Today, law student safety is a serious but often missed objective in American law schools. According to a recent survey, the typical American family wants to know their law student is safe even more than they want their law student to acquire a first-rate legal academic experience. Despite the importance of law student mental health to student performance, and cultural objectives unique to legal education, law students are not only highly vulnerable to acquiring mental health challenges during law school but are prone to be overlooked, and perhaps blamed or condemned for their mental health challenges, albeit unintentionally. My work asserts that despite the chief objective of law schools being to educate knowledgeable, competent, legal professionals, and provide them with the necessary skills to resolve complex legal essentials for corporations and government, as well as advance social justice, and to promote equal treatment for all, inherent in the nature of legal education, is a seemingly widely accepted risk of compromising law student mental health. Relying on qualitative studies and journalistic reports, my work will demonstrate that law students experience high incidents of personal depression, anxiety, extreme sadness, loss of interest or desire, feelings of guilt or low self-esteem, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, poor concentration, and a myriad of other mental and physical calamities, all of which greatly exceeds that of the law faculty, and surpasses levels experienced by medical and graduate students at American schools of higher education. My work further acknowledges that law student anxiety and depression are inextricably linked to the rigorous academic demands of legal education. Still it argues and set forth that law student mental health is related to avoidable conditions and patterns in the law school environment that enable or fail to account for the law student’s inexperience with coping with intense stress, emotional uncertainty, geographical isolation from loved ones, strained financial resources, poor job prospects, family strife, drug or alcohol abuse, homelessness, or lack of a culturally responsive learning environment. Granted, the legal profession is not for everyone. My work argues that law schools cannot turn a blind eye to the plight of law students as if no degree of accountability and responsibility lies with the law school. Indeed, law schools, albeit unintentionally, may be some of the chief investors in patterns of conduct that compromise the physical, emotional, and mental safety of law students. Recognition of a law school’s duty to students, in my view, requires law schools to resist the rhetoric of self-exceptionalism. Law schools, have an obligation, reluctantly or not, to concretely curtail repeated patterns of professional abuse, neglect, dereliction of academic duties, social domination, and student exploitation, that are uniquely embedded in the culture of legal education. Simply put, law student safety needs, coupled with the intricacies and unforgiving consequences of today’s competitive legal job market and high cost of legal education, warrant that law schools resist the impulses that prioritize institutional-preservation and subordinate student mental health under the guise of teaching students the harsh realities of the legal profession and preparing them for legal practice. My work argues that student physical, emotional, mental and academic safety should, and must become a critical component of legal education.

In 2014, a militant group calling itself the Islamic State (ISIS) rapidly took over more than 30 percent of the territory of Syria and Iraq. In the process, it captured billions of dollars (US) worth of oil fields and refineries, bank assets and antiquities, tanks, and armaments, and became one of the greatest threats to peace and security in the Middle East. In an effort to “degrade and defeat” ISIS, the United States, assisted by a handful of other Western and Arab countries, launched thousands of bombing sorties and cruise missile attacks against ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria since August 2014. While the Iraqi government had consented to foreign military action against ISIS within Iraq, the Syrian government did not. Rather, Syria protested that the air strikes in Syrian territory were an unjustifiable violation of international law.

This chapter examines whether the allied air strikes against Syria on April 14, 2018 may have crystalized an emerging customary norm of humanitarian intervention, thereby representing a historic development in international law.

Australia’s insolvency laws have a curious deficiency: There are virtually no provisions on the treatment of ongoing contracts. Such contracts may well represent some of the most valuable assets of a business debtor, small or large, especially in this new era of rapid technological innovation, where tangible property often pales in value to that inherent in intellectual property. Indeed, IP rights are often the nucleus around which a small business’s vitality revolves. The inability of businesses predictably to rely on, manage, and protect license contracts preserving IP rights is a problem that is sure to become more acute in the coming decades, as both the importance of IP rights and the incidence of business insolvency rise. Experience from across the Pacific portends a potential wave of coming disputes involving such rights in developed economies like Australia’s, potentially hitting small entrepreneurs hard and undermining the effectiveness of insolvency proceedings for these crucial debtors and their creditors. This article reveals a proliferation of disputes concerning IP license rights and several salient challenges confronted by both licensors and licensees, debtors and non-debtors, in domestic and cross-border insolvency proceedings in US insolvency proceedings. The common root of these challenges seems to be legislation that did not foresee the rise of IP licensing as a mainstay of modern entrepreneurship. The simple common solution, and a guide for Australian regulators, is more careful consideration of non-obvious pitfalls in laws that preserve IP license rights in insolvency cases to maximise value not only for the parties involved, but for modern societies who increasingly depend on innovation and entrepreneurship.