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.
