War is not just a human tragedy-it is an environmental catastrophe. Across the globe, armed conflicts leave behind oil-slickened rivers, poisoned soils, and forests reduced to barren landscapes. These harms last for generations, but they are not borne equally. The peoples who live most intimately with the land-drawing from it food, water, culture, and identity-suffer the most enduring losses. Their very existence as a people may be put at risk. This Article asks: How have the laws of war addressed environmental destruction, and, more specifically, what protection do they afford to communities whose very existence is bound to the places where conflicts unfold? For much of their history, the law of armed conflict ("LOAC") have paid limited attention to the natural world. In recent years, international legal scholarship has begun to take the environment seriously as a subject of sustained inquiry. Even so, the scholarship continues to overlook the particular ways in which war harms the relationship of communities and their environment. This Article steps into the rapidly growing conversation about war and the environment with three contributions: It develops a novel typology of the approaches that have historically guided the laws of war, identifies the emergence of a new "ecocultural" approach, and advances a normative justification for its further expansion. A historical review of the laws and debates on the LOAC since the 19th century reveals two dominant paradigms. The first, which we call the anthropocentric approach, treats nature as property or as a resource for human survival. It has roots in the 19th century but continues to be the dominant paradigm to this day. The second, the ecocentric approach, emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War's environmental destruction. It seeks to protect the "natural environment" without requiring a nexus to human harm. In recent practice, however, a third paradigm of LOAC engagement with the environment is emerging: the ecocultural approach. Its animating principle is that maintaining the integrity of relations with the environment is essential to the survival, identity, and dignity of certain peoples. The ecocultural approach appears in recent efforts to connect environmental harm to cultural practices. In 2023, for example, Colombia initiated prosecutions for environmental crimes on Indigenous, Tribal, and peasant territories during a fifty-year armed conflict. They have been lauded as the world's first environmental war crimes indictments. Their goal, however, was not the protection of the natural world, nor the protection of human lives and wellbeing alone. Rather, they aimed to protect the symbolic and material dimensions of the relationship between certain place-based peoples and their environment. The Article argues for further integration of the ecocultural approach into the LOAC and provides guidance for doing so. Amid growing calls to expand environmental protection during war, this proposed typology provides governments and international organizations with the historical basis and legally grounded conceptual resources to build a heightened regime of protection for the environment and its peoples.
The implementation of the OECD/G20's Global Anti-Base Erosion ("GloBE") Rules-commonly known as Pillar Two-marks a paradigm shift in international tax policy by establishing a coordinated global minimum corporate tax regime. While much of the early commentary has focused on its macroeconomic or policy implications, this Note examines how Pillar Two redefines the legal and commercial contours of cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Specifically, it explores how this regime disrupts conventional deal structures, alters the value of tax incentives, impacts purchase accounting, and introduces novel risks around scope testing and deferred tax treatment. In a landscape of asymmetric adoption and evolving regulatory guidance, this Note argues that Pillar Two will become a key determinant of tax due diligence, target valuation, and post-deal integration strategy. Transactional exposure to Top-up Taxes-including secondary liability under the Pillar Two charging provisions-requires the reconfiguration of risk allocation through tailored representations, warranties, and indemnities. Moreover, this Note identifies emerging gaps between financial and GloBE tax accounting that may distort jurisdictional effective tax rates and erode expected synergies. This Note's contribution lies in bridging doctrinal insights with transactional practice, drawing on OECD guidance, scholarly debate, and comparative implementation trends. By situating Pillar Two within the mechanics of real-world deals, it offers a forward-looking framework for multinational enterprises navigating the tension between global tax alignment and deal value preservation.
This Article identifies increasing reliance on the International Labour Organization's ("ILO") system for standard-setting and supervision within a wide array of labor rights enforcement routes that lie outside the organization. These findings prompt the re-thinking of international labor law enforcement. Rather than maintaining the conventional dichotomy between the ILO's traditional enforcement (often criticized as ineffective) and external mechanisms (frequently regarded as a problematic compromise due to their departure from the ILO's international labor standards), it is possible to envision an emerging and increasingly effective middle ground. According to this view, the ILO, in practice, harnesses external actors to enforce its norms, underpinned by its normative authority and expertise, through which it can shape norms of acceptable conduct in global labor markets. By influencing the mutual expectations among actors in this way, ILO standards serve as a constraint on the design of external regimes. Spotlighting these emerging processes and developing ways to enhance these existing connections between the ILO and external actors can thus expand our current toolkit for enforcing international labor law. More generally, the ILO's experience can apply to other international organizations in achieving greater coherence across numerous transnational enforcement regimes and their harmonization with treaty objectives.
On January 27, 2025, the Rwandan military and an armed proxy group known as the March 23 Movement seized Goma-a city of over one million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ("DRC")-in a lightning offensive. Two weeks later, they took over Bukavu, the second-largest city in eastern DRC. These advances are two of the most significant episodes in an armed conflict that began in November 2021 and has led to widespread extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, forced recruitment, and the displacement of over two million Congolese civilians. This Article argues that Rwanda's conduct amounts to an act of aggression, an unlawful use of interstate force in violation of the United Nations Charter. The reason is straightforward-Rwanda has no credible self-defense claim for a military takeover of its neighbor's territory. But accountability presents substantial challenges. International criminal prosecution of Rwandan officials is unlikely, as the International Criminal Court lacks jurisdiction over crimes of aggression in this case. And through years of shrewd diplomatic maneuvering, Rwanda has effectively shielded itself from meaningful political, financial, or legal consequences, such as the freezing of foreign aid. Rwanda's efforts to escape accountability must not be allowed to succeed. Only by holding political leaders and states accountable can the international community deter future aggression and preserve an international legal order premised on the illegality of interstate force. This Article provides a roadmap for doing so-tracing the history, elements, and unique harms of the crime of aggression, documenting the ongoing conflict in the DRC, demonstrating why Rwanda's conduct constitutes aggression, exploring how Rwanda's attack fits within a broader trend of interstate force, and identifying sanctions that states could impose on Rwanda-and other aggressors-outside the context of individual criminal responsibility.
Conventional wisdom holds that international law was created by powerful, primarily Western countries to preserve their own interests and is enforced accordingly by international courts. Yet weaker states have repeatedly won landmark victories in international courts against the world's most powerful states. Small states have also succeeded in bringing critical topics like climate change and nuclear weapons onto the dockets of international courts. Recently, states have brought high-profile cases before the International Court ofJustice in an attempt to stop atrocities during armed conflict, including South Africa v. Israel, Ukraine v. Russia, and The Gambia v. Myanmar. Unable to challenge stronger states on the battlefield or in the political arena, weaker states often turn to the courts. This Article challenges conventional wisdom by examining how weaker states use international courts to challenge more powerful ones. To do so, the Article introduces the International Dispute Resolution Dataset, an extensive, original dataset of information relating to all cases filed at the International Court of Justice, Permanent Court of Arbitration, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body. This Article analyzes interactions between weaker and stronger states in the International Court of Justice ("ICJ") to argue that weaker states are increasingly using international law to challenge more powerful states. The Article examines the conditions under which states file cases before the ICJ, conditions under which states are likely to prevail, and how trends in states' use of the ICJ have changed over time. This Article presents evidence that the majority of the world's states have interacted with the ICJ in some way, legitimizing its power as a global judicial institution, even at a time when critics are dismissing the international justice system.
The legal equality between belligerents is one of the core principles of International Humanitarian Law ("IHL"). Belligerent equality standardly entails that IHL rules regulating the conduct of hostilities apply symmetrically among enemy belligerents regardless of whether they are fighting war that is ad bellum lawful or unlawful. It is a corollary of the principle of separation between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Belligerent equality has been at the center of contemporary debates regarding the regulation of asymmetrical conflicts and "new wars." In this Article, I argue, first, that despite the fact that IHL rules apply symmetrically to different belligerents, there is a deeper sense in which this regime treats enemy belligerents unequally-namely, by conferring only some of them the status of combatants. In effect, combatant "privilege" (or "status") is distributed unevenly among participants in armed conflicts. I hereby offer here a unified account of combatant privilege that can, on the one hand, explain some of the normatively appealing features of the existing IHL regulation while, on the other, provide some critical bite to advance particular legal reforms. Second, I argue that combatant privilege ought not to be construed as a legal right (permission) to fight but, rather, as a legal immunity against being prosecuted for acts of war in compliance with IHL. I identify an underlying rationale that accounts for the distribution of combatant privilege as a matter of law, and explains this distribution on the basis of deeper normative considerations. Ultimately, I suggest that such privilege is grounded on the epistemic credentials of an individual's decision to take part in armed conflict (the evidence he or she had at her disposal). These credentials are largely determined by the function of authoritative directives, the empirical context in which decisions to resort to force are adopted, including the cognitive biases at play, as well as the salience of the justness of particular wars. Accordingly, the argument I favor accounts for the privilege of state armed forces by reference to the normative weight of state authorization in the empirical conditions in which individuals must decide to take part in asymmetrical wars-including, notably, the persisting influence of cognitive biases and the circumstances that constitute the "fog of war." These same considerations, in turn, account for the unequal treatment traditionally afforded to non-state armed groups under IHL. They also account for particular instances of non-state forces being conferred this privilege, such as individuals taking part in a lev & eacute;e en masse, or fighting national liberation wars, and even those militias and resistance movements acting as de facto organs of the state. Finally, I suggest that this argument accounts for the conditions under which participants in asymmetrical wars, such as foreign fighters, members of private military security companies, and child soldiers, ought to be conferred some form of immunity for taking part in armed conflict. The resulting framework not only identifies the precise normative basis of combatant privilege, its connection with ad bellum considerations, and its implications as an immunity against prosecution; it also brings IHL more in line with its fundamental normative commitments concerning agency, responsibility, and the reduction of wrongful harm.
The concept of sovereignty has commonly been traced back to the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War within the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th century. The Westphalian idea of sovereignty placed the state at the center of international relations, granting it absolute authority over its territory. However, today's understanding of sovereignty, a product of colonialism, 20th century wars, and contemporary globalization, has metamorphosed its Westphalian predecessor, subjecting states to international accountability. Non-state actors now occupy a pivotal position in international law: A prime example are foreign investors who benefit from a continually expanding territory of protection created by investment treaties, a crucial realm of which is access to investor-state dispute settlement. While investors often channel their legitimate grievances against a variety of sovereign conduct using this dispute settlement mechanism, on occasion, they also controversially misuse it as a backdoor to challenge measures that implicate a state's core fiscal policy. This Article argues that investor-state arbitral tribunals need to delimit the territory of investor protection by creating a jurisdictional dam to exclude specific matters that implicate the state's fiscal policy from attack in arbitration proceedings, in particular matters that are regulated through a state's legislative process and enactments concerning taxation measures. To this end, the Article presents several legal justifications, emanating notably from Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, as to why such matters deserve the protection of a more stringent understanding and application of a general principle of "fiscal sovereignty," arguably the last bastion of the Westphalian legacy.
The 2024 WIPO Treaty on Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge acknowledges formally the existence of traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples and local communities. Recognition of this knowledge as a matter of intellectual property law has been a subject of important and contested debate, including among scholars whose views on the justifications for proprietary models for traditional knowledge meaningfully differ. The WIPO Treaty does not address the rationale for giving legal protection to Traditional Knowledge. This Article supplements the existing literature on such rationales, broadening their potential base but also suggesting considerations that limit them. The Article examines bases on which Indigenous rights over the copying of Traditional Cultural Expression ("TCE") might arise. The Article takes issue with the common scholarly practice of borrowing criteria for legitimacy from the standards and policies of Western IP rights and criticizes the way Western IP is itself misunderstood. There may be routes through which Western law could open its doors to some rights aimed at protecting Indigenous privacy and preserving existing Indigenous culture.
This Article examines the World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge ("GRATK treaty" or "treaty"), the first international intellectual property ("IP") instrument that formally acknowledges Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities and the genetic resources ("GRs") and traditional knowledge ("TK") they develop and steward. The treaty requires utility patent applicants to disclose the country of origin or the source of the GRs and associated TK on which the claimed inventions are based. While it stops short of creating substantive rights, the treaty is an important extension of the global IP architecture and a model of how its internal processes can be effectively leveraged by weaker states. The Article highlights several promises of the GRATK treaty: It enshrines the symbolic and moral claims of Indigenous knowledge systems, expands prospects for economic value by facilitating benefit-sharing agreements across international regimes, strengthens the public interest in the patent system, and paves the way for innovation through hybrid knowledge frameworks that draw from diverse epistemological traditions. As the GRATK treaty moves toward ratification and implementation two milestones that face significant hurdles realizing its potential will require sustained attention to the design of enforcement mechanisms, a focus on the structural challenges posed by accelerating technological change, and a deeper reckoning with the role of communal knowledge in transnational innovation. Despite the substantial challenges ahead, the GRATK treaty marks a historic evolutionary step in the dynamics that have shaped contemporary global IP lawmaking and begins to address longstanding inequities in how innovation is recognized, rewarded, and regulated across diverse knowledge and cultural contexts.
A key issue in international intellectual property (`IP") negotiations for protecting Indigenous interests in genetic resources, traditional knowledge, and cultural expression is the integration of the framework of limitations and exceptions (`L&Es"). This framework allows certain acts that would otherwise infringe on IP rights and protection, limiting the scope of exclusive rights and legal protection for rightsholders to create a balanced IP system. However, L&Es can undermine Indigenous rights if applied without sensitivity to the cultural, spiritual, and economic interests of Indigenous people. This Article argues for an Indigenized L&Es framework, which may necessitate excluding L&Es in certain legal instruments. The 2024 World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, which omits L&Es, is cited as a positive example. While L&Es may be appropriate in other contexts, such as proposed treaties on traditional knowledge and cultural expressions, they must be developed and implemented with meaningful Indigenous participation to avoid harmful impacts and must respect Indigenous knowledge governance frameworks.
A historical and continuing concern of developing countries, Indigenous Peoples, and Local Communities is the misappropriation and misuse of their genetic and cultural resources. In 2000, the World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") established an Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore ("IGC") to address these concerns. Almost a quarter of a century later on May 24, 2024 WIPO member states concluded a binding Treaty on Intellectual capped the IGC's longstanding efforts to establish norms for the international protection of genetic resources and associated cultural assets. Unquestionably, the conclusion of the Treaty reaffirms and further enhances a sustained, long-term effort of a broad coalition of states and various stakeholders toward the rebalancing of the global intellectual property system anchored in the 1994 World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. Critically, the Treaty is the first WIPO agreement that explicitly acknowledges Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. This Article provides a first-hand account of the long and intricate pathway towards the adoption of the Treaty, illuminates and briefly analyzes the considerable challenges encountered during the negotiations that preceded its conclusion, and draws forward-looking lessons relevant to, most notably, the ongoing IGC negotiations on traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. These lessons highlight the fundamental importance of, in particular, (1) a champion to lead and drive the negotiations; (2) a negotiating environment and processes that facilitate a shared understanding of diverse and often incongruent policy positions; (3) a negotiating strategy that recognizes the importance of timing and builds support behind a text that appropriately balances the interests of a critical mass of member states and stakeholders; (4) an incremental approach towards negotiations on complex policy issues; and (5) a recognition that all negotiations are underpinned by personal relationships that depend on trust and respect.
Corporate social responsibility ("CSR') has a tax problem. The field encourages companies to do more for society than the minimum that is legally required. But, when it comes to companies avoiding tax, CSR has very little to say. Activists even allege that CSR merely distracts from companies' much costlier tax minimization strategies that deprive the state of needed revenue and thereby undercut the state's capacity to perform these very same functions. Though CSR has historically sidestepped questions of tax, this is beginning to change. Some major companies now discuss tax as a part of their corporate sustainability reporting. And CSR standard setters have started to consider including tax as a factor in their evaluation of corporate behavior. At the same time, countries around the world are starting to implement the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ("OECD') and G20 plan for a Global Minimum Tax. This program aims to enforce a minimum tax rate for large multinational corporations, thereby reducing incentives for tax arbitrage. Though this focus on tightening the rules regarding how much tax business entities owe is significant, companies will still retain much discretion as to where they pay tax. This Article argues that corporate discretion regarding where to pay tax is a pressing issue about which a more robust version of CSR may provide important guidance. It proposes that future dialogue between tax and CSR should focus not just on how much companies pay but also on where companies pay tax. The Article articulates how considerations of economic development, human rights, and environmental protection may inform the exercise of corporate tax discretion, and it examines the important ramifications of these decisions for global inequality.
A large body of evidence suggests that open, competitive markets are a key driver of economic development. In recognition of this fact, many of the world's leading economies not only adopted their own antitrust laws to promote competition, but they also urged developing countries around the world to do the same. This resulted in a remarkable proliferation of global antitrust law over the last several decades. Many studies have empirically examined the effect of this development, and, consistent with the hopes of policymakers, they have largely found that adopting antitrust laws produces positive economic outcomes. In this Article, we reassess the relationship between countries' antitrust laws and their economic growth. We improve on prior research by using more detailed data on countries' antitrust regimes and deploying a research design that more accurately captures countries' growth trajectories. This allows us to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between antitrust law adoption and market outcomes.Our results suggest that, on average, antitrust laws have had little to no impact on economic development. But we also find evidence suggesting that these laws have a positive effect on economic development in countries that have adopted antitrust laws out of a more genuine commitment to competition as opposed to following external pressures or incentives. Notably, we find that antitrust law is associated with increases in economic growth for countries that adopt antitrust laws without being required by a preferential trade agreement to do so. This suggests that domestic buy-in is critical for antitrust laws to foster economic growth. Our analysis thus reveals both the limits and the promise of antitrust law as a tool for economic development, helping us make sense of the past while guiding legislative reforms and enforcement efforts going forward.
Enforcing international labor law is a perennial problem. One popular perspective asserts that tying compliance to trade incentives is the solution: several OECD countries have recently promised to ramp up enforcement of the labor rights commitments in their international trade deals. However, little empirical work is available to explain why trade-based enforcement of international labor rights norms works in some cases but not in others—or even if it works at all. This Note assembles a novel dataset to investigate these questions by matching 53 trade-based labor rights enforcement cases under one of the world’s largest and oldest conditional trade programs, the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences, to information on the changes in labor conditions in each defendant country during litigation. The data reveal that labor rights enforcement cases are associated with improvements in independent union participation, freedom from forced labor, and employment equality in defendant countries about half the time. Using a generalized synthetic control design, this Note finds evidence that the cases may have caused these improvements. This Note then explores why trade-based labor enforcement works better against certain countries. It uses a multivariate regression approach. The results suggest that the best predictor of whether a labor enforcement case will improve labor conditions in a defendant country is not, as many scholars assumed, how much the defendant country depends on the trade benefits at stake. Instead, the best predictor of success is whether the defendant country is a political ally of the United States, as proxied by similarity in U.N. General Assembly voting records. These results suggest that trade-based labor rights enforcement works more through reputational and game- theoretic mechanisms than outright coercion.
Not far from the Labor Court, a woman in a snake-skin dress sits next to a wooden outhouse. The city has set up these so-called labor boxes for prostitutes. There, they are supposed to work and do their business simultaneously. It smells like feces and urine. She had just given a john a blowjob for twenty euros, the prostituted woman says-the drug addicts would do it for five euros. The woman says she's saving for a house for herself and her six-year-old son. "At some point, the time will come when we in Germany will be ashamed of what we have done to these young women from Eastern Europe," says Leni Breymaier, Bundestag MP for the Social Democratic Party (SPD). She has been campaigning for a sex purchasing ban in Germany for years. "To me, this is the slave trade of our time." [B]ecause crimes against humanity occur in peacetime, as well as during armed conflict, addressing them through prevention and punishment can play a key role in staunching . . . an "atrocity cascade" before it descends into unstoppable conflict and overwhelming criminality.
The increasingly harsh and unevenly distributed heat-related harms caused by climate change, together with frustration over the collective inability to respond to the crisis, are likely to make unilateral geoengineering efforts increasingly attractive. Stratospheric aerosol injection ("SAI") is a form of solar radiation modification that is effective, technically feasible, and within the financial means of many states and even non-state actors. Yet, there are virtually no global governance structures in place to specifically regulate such activity, and existing international law would provide only weak constraints on unilateral SAI efforts. These features create incentives for unilateral action in what is known as a "free driver" problem: few constraints on a unilateral action that has low direct cost combined with immediate direct individual benefit despite widely distributed risks and indirect costs. There would be significant collateral environmental and climatic harms associated with SAI. That, coupled with the high risk of unilateral action, is reason enough for both caution and stronger governance. But another risk posed by any unilateral SAI effort-one that is underappreciated and under-theorized-is that of armed conflict. We explore how and why states would likely perceive the potential risks associated with unilateral SAI effort as constituting a threat to national security, and in the absence of adequate legal and institutional mechanisms to constrain such unilateral action, might well contemplate the use of force to defend against the perceived threat. The Article explores and explains how and why the jus ad bellum regime is unlikely to prevent states from engaging in unauthorized use of force against In sum, there are strong incentives for unilateral SAI deployment, there is little in the way of global governance to constrain it, states will view it as a threat to national security, and the jus ad bellum regime is in turn unlikely to constrain any use of force in response-which creates a distinct risk that unilateral SAI deployment could result in armed conflict. We argue that this underappreciated risk, combined with the growing pressure and incentive for unilateral action, provides further grounds for the urgent development of more robust governance for SAI-specifically, apart from other forms of geoengineering. We argue that a traditional multilateral treaty structure with an accompanying institutional apparatus is required, and we provide some preliminary ideas on the objects and purposes of such a governance structure. We explain that either the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ("UNFCCC") or the Montreal Protocol would provide an ideal forum within which to commence the work of developing such a governance structure.
