This chapter introduces the concepts of convergence and fragmentation in international human rights law (IHRL) by providing and discussing their definitions and meanings. Building on the conclusion of the 2006 ILC Report on Fragmentation in international law and drawing on existing literature on the matter, the chapter assesses the extent of normative fragmentation and proposes a new definition of judicial fragmentation in IHRL. Moreover, this chapter also engages in a discussion of how convergence and fragmentation relate to the concepts of universality and relativism, key for any comparative discussion on human rights.

This introduction to the edited volume considers the complex and myriad interactions between Buddhism and constitutional law in Asia. It summarizes the main themes of the volume.

The story opens in the solemn setting of the Great Hall of Justice, where the President of the ICJ is about to deliver the Court’s judgment on a long and difficult dispute. Among the attendees is Sophie Richter, a clerk to ICJ judge Jürgen Lehmann. Sophie ponders about the many steps it took to get to this day: all the actors, visible and invisible, who contributed to the judicial process; all the interactions that occurred at every turn; and all the possible realities that were discarded along the way. The issuance of today’s judgment is, in fact, the end of a long and strenuous journey, which will be chronicled through successive flashbacks in the following chapters. Having set the stage for the narrative, the chapter introduces the central themes of the book. First, it reviews existing literature on international adjudication, including formalist treatises, critical accounts, and legitimacy-oriented analyses. Second, it invites the reader to consider the importance of everyday socio-professional practices in the definition of international judicial outcomes.

Chapter 1 applies Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to define necropolitical law as the norms, practices, and relations of enmity that justify and legitimize discounting life through killing, as well as through the diminishing of socially and politically empowered life. Mapping the co-constitutions of racialized discounted lives within the domestic terrain of the United States, as well as in global sites of the long War on Terror, the chapter’s provocation is that law – notions of authority, legitimacy, and community – is at work in effecting the nationally and globally discounted lives of the long War on Terror. Chapter 1 also supplies the contours for the book’s methodology and epistemology: law as culture; an interpretive sociolegal reading for law attentive to law’s archive and law’s violence; a normative commitment to rule of law’s scrutiny and restraint of power; and a suspicion of the roles of spectacle, affect, and publicity in displacing rule-of-law’s commitments to power’s accountability and to law as public thing.

This book tells the story of the formation of a new field of knowledge. It shows how various authors combined their knowledge, experience, and critical thought to write lawbooks that made various disparate customs into a field of knowledge known as customary law. These authors wrote texts, known as the coutumiers in the French legal tradition, in thirteenth-century northern France. ‘Customary law’ typically refers to a type of rule made in practice, and in the courts, by the community, which can include ‘the people’ in some form, lords and kings, or lawyers and judges. Customs concerning specific rules of property, succession, and other subjects certainly emerged out of this oral practice. Coutumier authors, however, successfully crafted customary law into an expository genre of writing, one that took ideas of custom from practical experience and different forms of book learning and transformed them into bodies of customary law.

The first constitutionalism was a gender exclusionary constitutionalism, which simply took a foundational gendered political order for granted, drawing from Enlightenment theories prevalent at the time. This chapter explains how the marital contract and the separate spheres tradition excluded women from the realm of equal citizenship rights despite constitutional appeals to the notion of equality. It shows how women were active in revolutionary moments and also seized to intervene in constitution-making from the very start and to advance various causes (e.g., temperance, female suffrage, abolitionism). The chapter then proceeds to show how women eventually conquered voting rights and the recognition of constitutional sex equality, along with provisions protecting motherhood and the family, first during interwar constitutionalism and then in post–World War II constitutionalism, and shows how none of this was sufficient to tackle the legacy of the separate spheres tradition, especially given the cultural hegemony of the breadwinner family model in the postwar years.

After recalling the context and purposes of the research, the chapter introduces the main challenges raised by the legal protection of animals during warfare: the silence of international humanitarian law on the issue, the difficulty in identifying which animals should be safeguarded, the inaptitude of international humanitarian law to adequately protect animals, and the ambivalent nature of the violence inflicted upon animals in wartime. The chapter then introduces the principal paradigms on which the legal protection of animals is grounded: animal species conservation regimes, animal welfare norms and animal rights. It subsequently emphasises three specific difficulties posed for animals by the current state of international law: the animal welfare gap in international law, the tension between species conservation and concern for individual animal welfare, and the fact that notably international trade and financial law has stymied animal welfare and protection efforts. The chapter then explores options to face these challenges while making best use of the legal strategies available within the existing normative framework. Potential new directions for developing international law on armed conflict are finally identified.

“The greatest comeback since Lazarus” is how Peter Ricchiuti, Assistant Dean of Tulane’s Business School, often described New Orleans’ recovery from Hurricane Katrina’s near-total devastation. In the years immediately following Katrina, Ricchiuti frequently welcomed students, graduates, and business professionals to New Orleans. Seeing visitors and newcomers amazed and inspired him, his colleagues, and his neighbors. Outside the Central Business District hotels where he often spoke at conferences, there were scores of shops, restaurants, and offices reopening for business, undeterred by vacant office towers and the lingering odor of basements still damp and moldy from floodwaters. A little farther away, across dozens of city neighborhoods, thousands of residents and volunteers were slowly rebuilding homes, businesses, and churches submerged for weeks following Katrina’s catastrophic levee breaches. For those who had observed firsthand New Orleans’ near-complete devastation, its resurgence was solemn and awe-inspiring.

This study explores the fragmented contemporary international legal instruments and practice relevant to sovereign defaults and has examined the question of whether and to what extent these instruments and practice can be reconceptualised as a regulatory framework for sovereign debt restructuring.

The relevance of broader public policy considerations in the sovereign debt discourse cannot be ignored given the rise of the perception of sovereign default as a global concern. Recent literature tries to introduce a public law or policy perspective into the sovereign debt discourse, such as the theory of international public authority, l’ordre public de la dette souveraine and an incremental approach. As a matter of judicial interpretation, however, public policy arguments as such cannot override the text of the contract or treaty provisions in force. A better approach will thus be to examine whether and to what extent the applicable contract, statutory and treaty provisions afford such public policy considerations through interpretation in such a manner that practical solutions to holdout problems are deduced without losing the balance between bondholder protection and respect for sovereign debt restructuring.

This chapter introduces the conceptual foundations of the international law of energy. It characterises ‘energy’ as a legal object, describes the purposes pursued over time by the international law of energy, analyses the overall structure of international energy transactions and presents the main patterns that can be extracted from a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the relevant rules, instruments and institutions.

The Introduction discusses key terms and concepts in the protection of civilians – ‘civilian’ and ‘protection’ in particular – while illustrating their unsettled and complex character. Key moments in history in international law, policy, and practice over the last century and a half are also considered. Key actors in the protection of civilians are identified setting the scene for the more detailed assessment of their roles of responsibilities in the remainder of the book.

International investment treaties accord foreign investors and their investments protection from unlawful encroachments by state authorities as well as violence by third parties. From the perspective of investors, this protection becomes especially relevant in times of armed conflict. For states, however, such times make the provision of this protection especially difficult. Arbitral proceedings in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring have laid bare unresolved issues and posed new challenges arising from the factual and legal implications of armed conflict. At the same time, international investment law is deeply rooted in issues of war and peace. Not only the first arbitration based on a modern bilateral investment treaty but also the historical precursors of international arbitration have touched upon armed violence and the treatment of aliens. This Introduction presents the themes of the book and provides an initial overview of the relevant legal framework and employed methodology.