{"title":"Corrigendum to: From Parker to the Australia Acts: Sir Victor Windeyer and the Short-Lived Triumph of the Independent Australian Britons","authors":"M. Lunney","doi":"10.1093/clp/cuab012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuab012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45282,"journal":{"name":"Current Legal Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47716457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What is the relationship between ‘racism’ and ‘race discrimination’? The paper explores this question. It shows that once we look beyond racism understood colloquially as individual bigotry, to racism understood in a structural sense as embedded in the social, economic, cultural and political dimensions of the State itself, it is possible to locate racism in the practice of discrimination law, within the category of race discrimination. Yet, discrimination law frequently fails to grasp structural racism. The paper reveals how this happens and in turn shows how race discrimination can be infiltrated with a structural view of racism. The overall purpose is to establish that discrimination law fails to be relevant in the face of contemporary forms of racism in the absence of a structural view.
{"title":"Structural Racism and Race Discrimination","authors":"Shreya Atrey","doi":"10.1093/clp/cuab009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuab009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What is the relationship between ‘racism’ and ‘race discrimination’? The paper explores this question. It shows that once we look beyond racism understood colloquially as individual bigotry, to racism understood in a structural sense as embedded in the social, economic, cultural and political dimensions of the State itself, it is possible to locate racism in the practice of discrimination law, within the category of race discrimination. Yet, discrimination law frequently fails to grasp structural racism. The paper reveals how this happens and in turn shows how race discrimination can be infiltrated with a structural view of racism. The overall purpose is to establish that discrimination law fails to be relevant in the face of contemporary forms of racism in the absence of a structural view.","PeriodicalId":45282,"journal":{"name":"Current Legal Problems","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42026385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Law is constantly caught between stasis and dynamism, between the production of legal certainty and the adaptation to a changing environment. The tension between both is particularly acute in international law, given the absence of legislative mechanisms on the international level and the high doctrinal thresholds for change through treaties or customary law. Despite this apparent tendency towards stasis, international law is changing frequently and rapidly in many areas, though in ways that are not well understood. This article seeks to begin an inquiry into these ways of change, starting from two vignettes of recent change processes and presenting a number of conjectures about core elements of a conceptualization of change in international law. The resulting picture reflects significant variation across different areas of international law, multiple paths of change outside traditional categories, and states in different—and not always central—roles. Much change observed in contemporary international law travels on paths and is advanced by authorities created by social actors and their practices relatively independently from doctrinal representations. This presents a challenge for doctrinal categories, and it should provoke a broader, empirical reconstruction of the social life of international law today—a far more dynamic but also less orderly life than typically assumed.
{"title":"The Dynamics of International Law Redux","authors":"Nico Krisch","doi":"10.1093/clp/cuab008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuab008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Law is constantly caught between stasis and dynamism, between the production of legal certainty and the adaptation to a changing environment. The tension between both is particularly acute in international law, given the absence of legislative mechanisms on the international level and the high doctrinal thresholds for change through treaties or customary law. Despite this apparent tendency towards stasis, international law is changing frequently and rapidly in many areas, though in ways that are not well understood. This article seeks to begin an inquiry into these ways of change, starting from two vignettes of recent change processes and presenting a number of conjectures about core elements of a conceptualization of change in international law. The resulting picture reflects significant variation across different areas of international law, multiple paths of change outside traditional categories, and states in different—and not always central—roles. Much change observed in contemporary international law travels on paths and is advanced by authorities created by social actors and their practices relatively independently from doctrinal representations. This presents a challenge for doctrinal categories, and it should provoke a broader, empirical reconstruction of the social life of international law today—a far more dynamic but also less orderly life than typically assumed.","PeriodicalId":45282,"journal":{"name":"Current Legal Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44976165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article argues that the old international law of empires, greater spaces, and regional orders did not disappear with the creation of the United Nations. While revisionist histories of international law have complicated the claim that a Westphalian order of independent states completely replaced a world of more varied political forms in the mid-seventeenth century, international lawyers nonetheless largely accept that such a transformation did take place at some point. The state is treated as the normative political subject of international law, and any move away from the geography of statehood as the foundation of the international legal system is seen as novel, exceptional, or illegal. The narrative that the state has become the primary political subject and spatial form of international law masks the persistence of regional orders as a core feature of the contemporary legal system. This article shows that international lawyers have been engaged in justifying, making sense of, narrating, and assembling regional orders for at least the past century. It explores the rival regionalisms promoted during the inter-war period, the struggles over regional orders during the early decades of decolonization, the expansive vision of regional orders consolidated in the early post-Cold War decades by the United States and its allies, and the regional ambitions of China in the twenty-first century. It analyses how regional orders are assembled and resisted through international law, what values are proclaimed to justify different forms of regional ordering, whose interests are represented, and the relation between grand narratives and technical transactions in that legal work. The article concludes that bringing the concept of regional orders to the foreground can open up a new and timely set of questions about politics, representation, and the future of international law.
{"title":"Regional Orders, Geopolitics, and the Future of International Law","authors":"Anne Orford","doi":"10.1093/clp/cuab005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuab005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that the old international law of empires, greater spaces, and regional orders did not disappear with the creation of the United Nations. While revisionist histories of international law have complicated the claim that a Westphalian order of independent states completely replaced a world of more varied political forms in the mid-seventeenth century, international lawyers nonetheless largely accept that such a transformation did take place at some point. The state is treated as the normative political subject of international law, and any move away from the geography of statehood as the foundation of the international legal system is seen as novel, exceptional, or illegal. The narrative that the state has become the primary political subject and spatial form of international law masks the persistence of regional orders as a core feature of the contemporary legal system. This article shows that international lawyers have been engaged in justifying, making sense of, narrating, and assembling regional orders for at least the past century. It explores the rival regionalisms promoted during the inter-war period, the struggles over regional orders during the early decades of decolonization, the expansive vision of regional orders consolidated in the early post-Cold War decades by the United States and its allies, and the regional ambitions of China in the twenty-first century. It analyses how regional orders are assembled and resisted through international law, what values are proclaimed to justify different forms of regional ordering, whose interests are represented, and the relation between grand narratives and technical transactions in that legal work. The article concludes that bringing the concept of regional orders to the foreground can open up a new and timely set of questions about politics, representation, and the future of international law.","PeriodicalId":45282,"journal":{"name":"Current Legal Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45268676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A string of corporate litigation cases in the United Kingdom highlights the role of corporate group structures in complicating efforts to impose liability on parent companies for the activities of their subsidiaries, particularly where those subsidiaries are located in the Global South. Corporate group structures serve to insulate parent companies against liability for actions of their subsidiaries. This is the case even where economic benefits accrue to parent companies, which are often incorporated in the Global North. These group structures cabin liability for environmental and climate harms within subsidiary companies through reliance on company law principles such as limited liability and separate legal personality. These company law principles allow parent companies to enjoy corporate profits from the activities of their subsidiaries but disavow liability for any environmental damage resulting from such activities. This dichotomy has obvious equity implications, which are exacerbated in the extractive industries and in the context of climate change. Negative climate impacts are and will be felt predominantly in the Global South. In addition, environmental damage removes avenues of climate adaptation for vulnerable populations. But company law principles are not impervious to these equity challenges. These principles have never been absolute and courts have consistently found exceptions to them, although those exceptions have fluctuated in effectiveness and frequency over the years. Recent decisions by the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court in the United Kingdom imposed duties on parent companies for environmental damage caused by their subsidiaries. Cases following the decision in Chandler v Cape Industries illustrate tension between company law as interpreted in the Global North, and climate and environmental justice as experienced in the Global South. Climate change forces a reconceptualization of company law, including transnational corporate liability. This paper argues that these reconsiderations are not only appropriate, but given the contested histories of many of these companies in the Global South, long overdue.
{"title":"Group Companies and Climate Justice","authors":"L. Benjamin","doi":"10.1093/clp/cuab007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuab007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A string of corporate litigation cases in the United Kingdom highlights the role of corporate group structures in complicating efforts to impose liability on parent companies for the activities of their subsidiaries, particularly where those subsidiaries are located in the Global South. Corporate group structures serve to insulate parent companies against liability for actions of their subsidiaries. This is the case even where economic benefits accrue to parent companies, which are often incorporated in the Global North. These group structures cabin liability for environmental and climate harms within subsidiary companies through reliance on company law principles such as limited liability and separate legal personality. These company law principles allow parent companies to enjoy corporate profits from the activities of their subsidiaries but disavow liability for any environmental damage resulting from such activities. This dichotomy has obvious equity implications, which are exacerbated in the extractive industries and in the context of climate change.\u0000 Negative climate impacts are and will be felt predominantly in the Global South. In addition, environmental damage removes avenues of climate adaptation for vulnerable populations. But company law principles are not impervious to these equity challenges. These principles have never been absolute and courts have consistently found exceptions to them, although those exceptions have fluctuated in effectiveness and frequency over the years. Recent decisions by the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court in the United Kingdom imposed duties on parent companies for environmental damage caused by their subsidiaries. Cases following the decision in Chandler v Cape Industries illustrate tension between company law as interpreted in the Global North, and climate and environmental justice as experienced in the Global South. Climate change forces a reconceptualization of company law, including transnational corporate liability. This paper argues that these reconsiderations are not only appropriate, but given the contested histories of many of these companies in the Global South, long overdue.","PeriodicalId":45282,"journal":{"name":"Current Legal Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47070632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
For lawyers and legal scholars, legislation seems a known quantity—a relatively permanent, public expression of democratic processes in parliamentary democracies and of the rule of law. This ‘knowable’ character can however be misleading, particularly in the field of environmental law. This article examines why research into environmental legislation is challenging but critically important. A short history of UK environmental law provides salient examples of political stress and highly complex, unsettled, even unknowable, environmental legislation. Collective environmental problems demand legislative responses in shaping individual behaviours and guiding social policies—but knowing how to craft these responses and how to evaluate the resulting legislation is often uncharted legal territory. Navigating that legislative terrain is a vital task for legal scholars and practitioners, particularly to investigate the serious legal problems that can arise from its construction, including poor legibility, legal fragmentation, and concerns about compatibility with the rule of law.
{"title":"Legislation and the Stress of Environmental Problems","authors":"Eloise Scotford","doi":"10.1093/clp/cuab010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuab010","url":null,"abstract":"For lawyers and legal scholars, legislation seems a known quantity—a relatively permanent, public expression of democratic processes in parliamentary democracies and of the rule of law. This ‘knowable’ character can however be misleading, particularly in the field of environmental law. This article examines why research into environmental legislation is challenging but critically important. A short history of UK environmental law provides salient examples of political stress and highly complex, unsettled, even unknowable, environmental legislation. Collective environmental problems demand legislative responses in shaping individual behaviours and guiding social policies—but knowing how to craft these responses and how to evaluate the resulting legislation is often uncharted legal territory. Navigating that legislative terrain is a vital task for legal scholars and practitioners, particularly to investigate the serious legal problems that can arise from its construction, including poor legibility, legal fragmentation, and concerns about compatibility with the rule of law.","PeriodicalId":45282,"journal":{"name":"Current Legal Problems","volume":"44 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138506760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article chronicles the evolution of the field of online dispute resolution from its inception in the mid-1990s to its current application in and outside the court system. While originally ODR played a modest role in the limited domain of e-commerce, over the years its application has expanded significantly, as have its form and function: from processes that have sought to replicate online equivalents to ones that reimagine the design of procedures to better fit party needs and to address the justice system’s longstanding problems. The article predicts that the future of ODR lies in increased automation, which includes artificial intelligence and various forms of structured negotiation, and, consequently, a reduced role for human third parties. This will require a rethinking of the ways in which access to justice, procedural justice and substantive justice can be realized. The key for realizing the values and goals of the justice system lies in the careful design and ongoing evaluation of online systems, activities that have themselves been transformed by technology and the availability of big data.
{"title":"The Past, Present, and Future of Online Dispute Resolution","authors":"Orna Rabinovich-Einy","doi":"10.1093/clp/cuab004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuab004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article chronicles the evolution of the field of online dispute resolution from its inception in the mid-1990s to its current application in and outside the court system. While originally ODR played a modest role in the limited domain of e-commerce, over the years its application has expanded significantly, as have its form and function: from processes that have sought to replicate online equivalents to ones that reimagine the design of procedures to better fit party needs and to address the justice system’s longstanding problems. The article predicts that the future of ODR lies in increased automation, which includes artificial intelligence and various forms of structured negotiation, and, consequently, a reduced role for human third parties. This will require a rethinking of the ways in which access to justice, procedural justice and substantive justice can be realized. The key for realizing the values and goals of the justice system lies in the careful design and ongoing evaluation of online systems, activities that have themselves been transformed by technology and the availability of big data.","PeriodicalId":45282,"journal":{"name":"Current Legal Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46902748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There is a long tradition of international relations and legal scholars warning of the demise of the jus ad bellum—the body of international law that governs when states may use force across national borders. I argue in this Lecture, presented at The University College London Faculty of Laws in October 2020, that these warnings have mostly been wrong. The reason they have been wrong is that they have misdiagnosed the main threat to the jus ad bellum, or at least, they have myopically focused on and grossly overstated the seriousness of a particular kind of threat. And in doing so, they have diverted attention away from other challenges that might actually push the contemporary jus ad bellum to the breaking point—and that we might now confront.
长期以来,国际关系和法律学者一直在警告“战争法”(jus and bellus)的消亡。“战争法”是国际法的主体,规定国家何时可以跨越国界使用武力。在2020年10月伦敦大学学院法学院的这次演讲中,我认为这些警告大多是错误的。他们错误的原因是,他们错误地诊断了对“战争法”的主要威胁,或者至少,他们目光短浅地关注并严重夸大了某种特定威胁的严重性。在这样做的过程中,他们转移了人们对其他挑战的注意力,这些挑战实际上可能会将当代战争法推向崩溃的边缘,而我们现在可能会面临这些挑战。
{"title":"What Might (Finally) Kill the Jus ad Bellum?","authors":"Monica Hakimi","doi":"10.1093/clp/cuab003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuab003","url":null,"abstract":"There is a long tradition of international relations and legal scholars warning of the demise of the jus ad bellum—the body of international law that governs when states may use force across national borders. I argue in this Lecture, presented at The University College London Faculty of Laws in October 2020, that these warnings have mostly been wrong. The reason they have been wrong is that they have misdiagnosed the main threat to the jus ad bellum, or at least, they have myopically focused on and grossly overstated the seriousness of a particular kind of threat. And in doing so, they have diverted attention away from other challenges that might actually push the contemporary jus ad bellum to the breaking point—and that we might now confront.","PeriodicalId":45282,"journal":{"name":"Current Legal Problems","volume":"101 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138541937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article argues that Grotius has a modern theory of the state that can take its place alongside Bodin and Hobbes as one of the ways in which early modern civil philosophy sought to solve the problem of the authority and validity of political order. This is interesting because Grotius’s account of the state draws a picture of the relationship between political and legal ordering, and history, in which the interrelationship of the political and the legal allows a range of adaptive and adaptable state-forms. State authority is made possible and accountable under a system of natural legal right, even as its constitution is a historical achievement that should not readily be disturbed and in which a large range of freedom and unfreedom is lawful and should be accepted. I argue that, understood in this way, the State Theory of Grotius is not only modern, but provides in its methods and insights, a potential answer to one of the key conceptual dead ends of modern theories of sovereignty: the idea that sovereign power must be perpetually concentrated in one organ or entity if it is to retain what makes it sovereign. Along the way, I highlight the significance of state theory for contemporary discussions of international, transnational and global law.
{"title":"The State Theory of Grotius","authors":"Nehal Bhuta","doi":"10.1093/CLP/CUAA005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/CLP/CUAA005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that Grotius has a modern theory of the state that can take its place alongside Bodin and Hobbes as one of the ways in which early modern civil philosophy sought to solve the problem of the authority and validity of political order. This is interesting because Grotius’s account of the state draws a picture of the relationship between political and legal ordering, and history, in which the interrelationship of the political and the legal allows a range of adaptive and adaptable state-forms. State authority is made possible and accountable under a system of natural legal right, even as its constitution is a historical achievement that should not readily be disturbed and in which a large range of freedom and unfreedom is lawful and should be accepted. I argue that, understood in this way, the State Theory of Grotius is not only modern, but provides in its methods and insights, a potential answer to one of the key conceptual dead ends of modern theories of sovereignty: the idea that sovereign power must be perpetually concentrated in one organ or entity if it is to retain what makes it sovereign. Along the way, I highlight the significance of state theory for contemporary discussions of international, transnational and global law.","PeriodicalId":45282,"journal":{"name":"Current Legal Problems","volume":"73 1","pages":"127-176"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44996909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}