Correspondence

Feminism and International Law: Twenty Years after Charlesworth, Chinkin, and Wright

We can sit down and look at the realistic possibility of making the WTO work for the whole world. We should be realistic. We shouldn't be kidding ourselves that the WTO is all right at the moment. It's not all right. In this chapter, we make a first attempt to posit WTO law in the wider context of public international law. The sources of WTO law are summed up and some of the special features of WTO law, of particular importance to conflict of norms, are examined. WTO law as ‘just’ another branch of public international law For WTO law to be a relevant example in this study on conflict of norms in public international law, it should be established first that WTO law is, indeed, part of public international law. With one possible exception, no academic author, WTO decision or document disputes that WTO rules are part of the wider corpus of public international law. Like international environmental law and human rights law, WTO law is ‘just’ a branch of public international law. To public international lawyers, my call in the April 2000 issue of the American Journal of International Law for WTO rules to ‘be considered as creating international legal obligations that are part of public international law’ is a truism. As one author noted in response: ‘It is difficult … to envisage any other possible status for rules emanating from a treaty concluded among States under international law, as the WTO Agreement.’

In his recent piece in the American Journal of International Law, B.S. Chimni depicts a doctrine of customary international law that has allowed the First World to impose its domination and promote its version of global capitalist justice. From Chimni's perspective, all the gimmicks and sophisticated dichotomies invented by international lawyers to refine international customary law serve a hegemonic socialization process whereby the center imposes its neoliberal ideals on an admiring periphery. But this diagnosis is certainly not the end of the story. In fact, Chimni's dismal image of the world and the role of custom therein is meant to foreground a more central project—i.e., the reinvention of customary international law around “the progressive ideas, beliefs, and practices of the global civil society” and geared towards the promotion of the “common good.” My view is that Chimni's postmodernization of the doctrine of international customary law does not necessarily remedy the charges he levels against custom, let alone redefine the center and the periphery. As much as I share his diagnosis about custom's complicity in hegemonic socialization and the promotion of a global capitalist ethos, I contend that Chimni's postmodernization is at best unavailing and, at worse, rehabilitative of the First World's centrality in norm-setting. Instead of striving to reinvent the doctrine of custom, we must invest in strategies that draw on the malleability and fluidity of the current doctrine and facilitate the types of argumentation that “decenter” the First World, thereby directly empowering international lawyers elsewhere.

In an interview with BBC television on 19 March 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron described the use of force against Libya in terms of United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 (2011) as �necessary, legal and right�. This statement once again illustrated the fact that, especially with respect to the use of force in the execution of foreign policy, justification in terms of applicable international law principles weighs heavily on the minds of statesmen. It is therefore not surprising that it is increasingly being recognized in contemporary academic discourse that international law and international politics and security are intertwined subjects and that international law provides a useful paradigm for the analysis of international relations. The momentous events of 11 September 2001, which marked the advent of asymmetric warfare, challenged the ability of especially Western democracies to deal with hitherto unknown security challenges within the established framework of international law. These developments provided fertile soil for developing a discourse on the relationship between international law and international relations and diplomacy, conducted by both academics and practitioners. However, in American legal tradition this discourse has already been present for several decades: almost half a century ago the American Society of International Law published Legal Advisers and Foreign Affairs,1 a collection of essays by legal advisers to foreign ministries from a variety of states, and an article on the role of the Legal Adviser to the Department of State appeared in the American Journal of International Law2 in 1962. The book under review returns to this theme. The question to be explored, in the words of Harold Koh, present State Department Legal Adviser who wrote the foreword, is what role international law plays in foreign policy crises. Furthermore, the book aims at contributing to an understanding of the role of the �

Early themes of the second Trump administration's orientation toward international space law include military assertiveness, privatization, and nominal diplomatic engagement. These themes carry significant implications for international space law. They pressure longstanding international legal ambiguities, widen existing geopolitical divisions, and raise questions about how public-private interdependence will shape state responsibility and the development of norms in space. This essay was prepared for a special issue of the American Journal of International Law that offers an introduction and overview of the U.S. government's actions across a wide range of international legal issues in the first six months of President Trump's second term.

Editor’s Note: Through the generosity of The International Law Fund, the American Journal Of International Law is able to undertake, on an experimental basis, a new section devoted to Contemporary Practice of the United States relating to International Law.

Journal Article AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD JAPAN AND CHINA, 1937–38 Get access QUINCY WRIGHT, QUINCY WRIGHT Dr. Wright is Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago and Chairman of that university's Norman Wait Harris Memorial Foundation. He is a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International law, and formerly was Special Assistant in International Law for the Navy Department. Mr. Nelson is a graduate student in political science at the University of Chicago. This article is based on a longer study in which the authors explain the precise nature of the newspaper attitudes from which their conclusions are derived. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar CARL J. NELSON CARL J. NELSON Dr. Wright is Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago and Chairman of that university's Norman Wait Harris Memorial Foundation. He is a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International law, and formerly was Special Assistant in International Law for the Navy Department. Mr. Nelson is a graduate student in political science at the University of Chicago. This article is based on a longer study in which the authors explain the precise nature of the newspaper attitudes from which their conclusions are derived. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 1939, Pages 46–62, https://doi.org/10.1086/265259 Published: 01 January 1939

When I first read Eunomia as it came out in 1990, I was as baffled about it as most of its readers. It was a hard read because of its unconventional prose and because of the difficulty to situate the work by reference to any academic tradition – visible most puzzlingly in the complete absence of any notation. It was even unclear what the genre was in which this book had been written. Fortunately, I was called up to write a review for the American Journal of International Law, which enabled me to carry out a more sustained engagement with the work. But increasing familiarity with the work has not made these large questions go away. The more one could look away from the form of Philip’s writing, the more another set of questions set in – namely questions about what really was its message and, above all, its political implications, including political and institutional consequences for the work of the international lawyer. In this brief contribution I would like to discuss Philip’s second major book, the justly award-winning The Health of Nations, especially by juxtaposing its form and its content and with the view to elucidating this one question: How revolutionary is it? I have been both fascinated and troubled by Philip’s work. It is both easy and hard. It is easy in the sense that many of the things that are suggested seem practically selfevident. It is not difficult to accept Philip’s analysis of the present state of human society, and especially of what he calls, in perfect logic, the international unsociety. Yet I am puzzled by the fact that the division of the social world into two spheres – the international and the domestic – that emerges as one of Philip’s principal targets as being not only arbitrary but also obstructive of all beneficial change has been uncontroversial among international lawyers for most of the past century. Many other points that Philip makes – his critique of bureaucratization and of state egoism, of absence of a historical consciousness, of capitalism’s alienating effects, and so on – are points that many (though possibly not all) international lawyers would agree with. And they have agreed with these points from the moment when Philip writes that philosophy ended – from around 1870 – and was replaced by the professional vocabulary – and credo – of liberal legal cosmopolitanism.

Journal Article Mezhdunarodnoe Sotrudnichestvo v Oblasti Kommercheskogo Arbitrazha, Mezhdunarodnye Konventsii, Soglasheniya I Drugie Dokumenty po Voprosam Arbitrazha (International Cooperation in the Meld of Commercial Arbitration, International Conventions, Agreements and Other Documents on Questions of Arbitration). Get access Mezhdunarodnoe Sotrudnichestvo v Oblasti Kommercheskogo Arbitrazha, Mezhdunarodnye Konventsii, Soglasheniya I Drugie Dokumenty po Voprosam Arbitrazha (International Cooperation in the Meld of Commercial Arbitration, International Conventions, Agreements and Other Documents on Questions of Arbitration). By Lebedev S.N.. Moscow: USSR Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 1979. Pp. 216. George Ginsburgs George Ginsburgs *Member, Board of Editors. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 31, Issue 3, Summer 1983, Pages 549–551, https://doi.org/10.2307/839999 Published: 01 July 1983

The American Society of International Law (ASIL) is a globally important American professional non-governmental organization, organized by and for international lawyers as a learned society, and influential in its legal interpretations. For its first sixty years, it excluded African Americans. Subsequently, African Americans were allowed incremental but slowly widening participation, though they were still excluded from the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) Board of Editors. Divesting its stock portfolio to oppose apartheid was a reluctant step toward racial justice in 1986. The rise of a new minority-led racial critique of the Society produced, inter alia, the first African American AJIL Board member in 2014, followed by others. It also produced the adoption of the “Richardson Report,” which confirmed the early deliberate African American exclusion, and called for a reparations obligation to Black members. In 2020, new Society statements and priorities toward racial equity and diversity were added to a previous active Black task force (BASIL). However, the Society's transformation toward racial equity will depend upon its committed defiance of the current historic global white nationalist extremism which threatens to penetrate international law in America and the global community. This essay discusses ASIL's racial narratives from its origins of deep racial exclusion, through racial incrementalism to policy changes and reparations obligations toward greater equity, as it now confronts global white identity extremism.

Journal Article The Japanese Annual of International Law. (1969) Get access THE JAPANESE ANNUALOF INTERNATIONAL LAW. (1969). Tokyo: The International Law Association of Japan, 1969. Pp. 280. Hilliard A. Gardiner Hilliard A. Gardiner *The City University of New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 19, Issue 4, Autumn 1971, Pages 797–798, https://doi.org/10.2307/839530 Published: 01 October 1971

73 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 42, No.2, Winter 2019 Modernizing Islamic Law in Pakistan: Reform or Reconstruction? Muhammad Khalid Masud* Introduction Academic studies stress failure of modernizing Islamic law in Pakistan, generally from the perspective of modernization theory of development. This critique is sometimes specific with reference to particular legislations, but mostly it is general to illustrate the modernization theory. This essay refers to studies by Joseph Schacht,1 N. J. Coulson,2 Abdullahi Ahmad An-Na’im,3 Donald L. Horowitz,4 Wael B. Hallaq,5 Martin Lau6 and Jan Michiel Otto.7 *Muhammad Khalid Masud, M.A. and Ph.D. (McGill), is presently an Ad Hoc judge, Shariat Appellate Bench, Supreme Court of Pakistan. His major publications including both edited and co-edited works are Shatibi’s Philosophy of Islamic Law, Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Ijtihad, Islamic Legal Interpretation, Travelers in Faith, Dispensing Justice in Islam, Nuqushe-e Tagore and forthcoming Freedom of Expression in Islam: Challenging Apostasy and Blasphemy law, coedited by Lena Larsen, Muhammad Khalid Masud, Kari Vogt, Christian Moe (2019). 1 Joseph Schacht, “Problems of Modern Islamic Legislation,” Studia Islamica (1960), 99129 ; and An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 2 N.J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 1964); and Conflicts and tensions in Islamic jurisprudence, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). 3 Abdullahi Ahmad An-Na’im, Towrads an Islamic Reformation, Civil Rights, Human Rights, and International Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990); Islam and the Secular State, Negotiating the Future of Shari’a (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 4 Donald L. Horowitz, “The Quran and the Common law; Islamic Law Reform and the theory of legal change.” The American Journal of Comparative Law (1994), 233-293, 238. 5 Wael Hallaq, Shari’a, Theory, Practice and Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 6 Martin Lau,”Shari’a and National Law in Pakistan,” Jan Michiel Otto (Ed.), Sharia Incorporated (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2010), 373-432, 388; “Twenty-Five Years of Hudood Ordinance- A Review,” Washington and Lee Law Review (2007), 1291-1314. 7 Jan Michiel Otto (Ed.), Sharia Incorporated, A Comparative Overview of the Legal Systems of Twelve Muslim Countries in Past and Present (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2010). 74 Legislation In Pakistan This article first discusses the specific comments by the above-mentioed scholars on modernist legislation in Pakistan, particularly on the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961 and Hudood Ordinance 1979. Since these comments are part of a larger critique of Islamic law from the perspective of modernization theory, they overlook certain important facts, apparently paying more attention to theory than to the local context, and portray Islamic legal tradition as unchanged and unchangeable. This study focuses on the modernization theory as a general critique. The Muslim Family Law Ordinance of 1961: A modernist reformist legislation Schacht found this legislation typically weak on the following points: (1) It did not arise out of a genuine public demand. (2) It was recommended by a Commission, not by the parliament. (3) The majority of the members in the commission were modernists. (4) The minority report opposed almost all of the recommendations. (5) It met with strong opposition by the traditionalists. (6) Modernists in Pakistan rely on Ijtihad for reshaping of Islamic law. Their methods of Ijtihad include reinterpretation and reference to general principles. Pakistani modernists are more conditioned by the traditional system, even if negatively, than the modernists in the Near East.8 It is not possible to analyze all these observations in this short essay; we will only focus on the most relevant comments. Schacht’s criticism is informed by the fact that a tension existed between modernists and traditionalists in Pakistan. However, to say that it was not in response to public demand ignores the context of this legislation. The legislation preceded by protests and street demonstration by All Pakistan Women Association for women’s rights, particularly against the practice of polygamy. A commission was established to formulate recommendations on family laws. The law was passed by an ordinance in the absence...

It is not clear what there is left for a commentator to say once a symposium has unfolded in such a way as to cancel itself out. But in case others read it differently than I do, I am happy to explain how I think this process occurs across the wonderful though self-canceling pages of the American Journal of International Law symposium on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and—through valedictory reflection on thoseenter prises—on contemporary international criminal law so far. The self-cancellation process, as I see it, takes place in the move from creation story and doctrinal evolution to impact measurement amidst legacy rhetoric. One might take this result as an index of where things stand (or whether anything stands) in the fascinating emergence of a prestigious enterprise—and what might come next.

Journal Article Laws Concerning Unfair Competition and the Conflict of Laws Get access Wilhelm Wengler Wilhelm Wengler 1WilhelmWengler is Professor of International and Comparative Law, Free University of Berlin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 4, Issue 2, Spring 1955, Pages 167–188, https://doi.org/10.2307/837219 Published: 01 April 1955

Journal Article E-Government Get access John C. Reitz John C. Reitz *Edward L. Carmody Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International and Comparative Law Programs at the University of Iowa College of Law. The author would like to acknowledge generous summer research support from the University of Iowa Law Foundation, research assistance from Iowa students Charles Bork, Shigehito Onimura, Ai Tong, and Tyson Wray, and helpful comments and ideas from colleagues Randall Bezanson, Arthur Bonfield, Nicholas Johnson, Larry Ward, and Tung Yin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 54, Issue suppl_1, Fall 2006, Pages 733–754, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/54.suppl1.733 Published: 01 October 2006