This chapter proposes a brief lexical history of the English term ‘responsibility’, starting from the Latin ‘respondere’, through French and Anglo-Norman, up to the emergence of the abstract noun in modern languages. Seen from a purely semantic diachronic perspective, ‘responsibility’, as a legal term, expresses the idea that one may be called upon to answer for one’s activity (or inactivity) but does not itself denote the prerequisites of liability nor hints at the source or nature of any duty to do so. It looks at what is to be done in the future, not to the imputation of a duty by reference to what has gone before. If the meaning that history brings to light is quite neutral – and pivots around the ordinary, basic meaning of the verb ‘respondere’: ‘to say something in answer to a question’ – ‘responsibility’ appears nonetheless to be most appropriate to signify the distinctive feature of contemporary international law, namely that States ‘have to answer’ for their actions.

People in wealthy countries live in a state that is defined by the power to tax and dependent on taxation to fund government, which we call a ‘tax’ state.1 Most of the member states in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are tax states. This book discusses taxation law and policy in the economic, social, legal and political context of tax states and explores the many challenges faced by these tax states in the twenty-first century.

Transnational regulatory regimes are often not exclusive within their regulatory domains. The regulatory reach of different regimes often overlap, potentially subjecting a particular actor to contradicting regulatory demands – a condition called ‘legal pluralism’. There are different kinds of pluralist overlap. We can distinguish between internal pluralism, in which regulatory overlap can be resolved juridically, and external pluralism, in which it has to be resolved politically; we can also distinguish between symmetrical pluralism, involving a regulatory overlap between two regimes operating at the same geographical scale, and asymmetrical pluralism, in which the overlap involves regimes operating at different geographical scales. And we can distinguish between cooperative pluralism, where the overlapping regimes cooperate in addressing the overlap, and non-cooperative pluralism, where they compete for dominance. Transnational regulatory environments have developed a number of ways of responding to these different kinds of pluralist overlaps – such as using a conflicts-of-law approach to handle issues of internal pluralism.

The tax state of the twentieth century succeeded because it harnessed tax revenues from workers. The application of income taxes on wages, social security taxes levied on workers and employers, or even broad-based consumption taxes was impossible before the existence of a mass labour market delivering wages higher than subsistence level. When waged work became widespread in the industrialising economies of the twentieth century, governments gradually overcame barriers to successful taxation of labour income.

This chapter starts from a familiar question: is State responsibility in international law usefully understood on the model of domestic private law or on that of domestic criminal law or neither? It then discusses the attractions and limits of the model of private law. It then turns to ‘international crimes’ or ‘serious breach[es] of an obligation arising under a peremptory norm of general international law’ as defined in the International Law Commission's successive works and discusses the ways in which the provisions for such wrongs seem analogous or disanalogous to domestic criminal law. The next section takes up the suggestion that a distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ law is conceptually and practically preferable to that between ‘international crimes’ and ‘international delicts’: is this the best way to capture a category of international wrongs that merit a distinctive response? The final section asks whether State responsibility thus understood can usefully be seen as a species of ‘criminal’ responsibility and whether it offers domestic theorists a fruitful way of ‘deconstructing’ criminal law.

The author discusses the responsibility of International Organizations under international law. With the help of two case studies (the proposed relocation of a refugee camp involving the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and a water project involving, amongst others, the World Bank), the chapter discusses three central elements of international responsibility: obligation, attribution and causation. It concludes that, often enough, allegations concerning the responsibility of international organizations owe much to opportunism. Since the current legal regime is not very helpful, responsibility claims flow like water: they flow wherever they can, relatively independent from obligation, attribution and causation.

In order to gain allegiance, a transnational regulatory regime must be able to demonstrate its ‘regulatory legitimacy’ – it must persuade its members, and sometimes the global community in general, that it is addressing a true regulatory need. Most commonly, such regimes will appeal to one or more of the following conditions as being the basis for its regulatory legitimacy: transnational interdependency; global convergencies that are resulting in common regulatory needs that are more efficiently addressed at the transnational level; cosmopolitanism; the distinct concerns of particular transnational regional or professional populations; and the capacity of transnational law to facilitate emancipation from oppressive domestic regulatory structures. Establishing these various ‘bases of regulatory legitimacy’ often involve making empirical claims that can be subject to considerable contestation. As examined later in this volume, all this implicates the particular kinds of regulatory activities (see Chapter 3) and governance structures (see Chapter 4) the regime can support.

This chapter examines the temporality around which international law is articulated, with an emphasis on the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter specifically elaborates on how the doctrine of international responsibility suspends international law’s one-directional temporality and provides discursive devices that allow one to travel back and forth between the past of wrongfulness and the present of responsibility. Such two-directional temporality, the chapter argues, is at the service of the narrative function of international responsibility in that such two-way time travel allows a re-representation of the real produced by legal claims made under the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter ends with concluding remarks on the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

The author concludes the volume by reflecting on the interface between philosophy and law, arguing that they are both complementary and interdependent. He shows examples of the legal translation of philosophical principles and stresses the necessity to establish a system of responsibility – that is, a clear system of sanctions – so that philosophical and legal norms do not remain mere gratuitous statements. The chapter reflects on the philosophical foundations of legal responsibility, the historical movement of gradual individualization of responsibility and the shift to joint obligation to respond to collective threats and challenges. It ultimately argues that classical responsibility reduced to an essentially inter-individual relationship is technically very sophisticated, both philosophically and legally, but insufficient to face collective challenges (in particular the environmental crisis).

This chapter examines a central moral problem arising in connection with the law on State responsibility: the problem of justifying the liability of ordinary State subjects for the material fulfilment of the remedial duties arising from their State’s wrongs. After isolating the problem and explaining its relationship to the question of whether States are moral agents, it critically examines a range of different justifications for subject liability, with a focus on theoretical justifications that have received less extensive attention in the literature. It considers: (1) causal contribution, (2) benefitting, (3) duties of aid, (4) part-constitution, (5) authorisation, (6) fictive authorisation, (7) moral vicarious liability, (8) duties to support valuable institutions and (9) lesser evil. The overall conclusion is that, even when State subjects are not morally responsible for the wrong which triggered a remedial duty, there are not infrequently moral liability justifications for State subjects bearing the costs of remedial duties. However, in practice, the imposition of subject liability is likely to be fully justified only on lesser evil grounds.