Q: Why does nationality matter? Why does it matter from the perspective of the state and why does it matter from the perspective of the parties to the dispute?

Former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Bertha Wilson wrote an article in 1990 entitled “Will Women Judges Really Make a Difference?”1 in which she examined the perspective one’s gender gives to framing and deciding legal issues. I think one’s nationality plays a similar role. There is a collective experience with, and perspective on, international law (fostered by conferences like the CCIL’s annual conference and the mere existence of the CYIL) that is distinctly ours. To the state, the legitimacy of a decision in a dispute to which the state is a party is probably enhanced by having a national on the court (with the International Court of Justice [ICJ], this perception can be accomplished with the appointment of ad hoc judges where the disputing state does not have a judge of its nationality on the bench). However, this would not account for the contribution that Canadians can make to international courts and tribunals involving other states on international law issues generally. For as you all know, international law is not just made by treaty making but also through judicial interpretations of those treaties and state practice.

This article explores how low-level bureaucrats in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand both construct and feel for “endangered” Hindu subjects in ways that profoundly shape their legal practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from rural Uttarakhand, I suggest that focusing on the sociohistorical production of embodied feeling among bureaucrats allows us to understand the incremental, almost unremarked, remaking of law along majoritarian lines. I situate this inquiry in a social and political context marked by violent suspicion of religious minorities, especially Muslim men. Tracking bureaucratic anxieties around love jihad specifically, this article engages the following questions: How are state conceptions of justice, victimhood, and culpability shaped by particular embodied affects which, in turn, are moulded by contingent historical regimes of identification and suspicion? Through what socially resonant attachments and disavowals does this structure of feeling and thinking come into being? How do the emergent, contingent feelings of state actors shape the everyday acts of storytelling, interpretation, and evaluation that make up the reading of a legal case?

This article analyzes the influence of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence and the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) during congressional debates in 1949 that focused on establishing a territorial government for American Samoa. In these hearings, naval leaders argued that Supreme Court decisions that had interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment as demanding colorblindness and others that established property ownership as a fundamental right, along with the creation of the UDHR, meant that Samoans might not be able to protect their land from further white-settler colonialism if Congress passed legislation establishing a civilian government in American Samoa. U.S. military leaders believed that the Court’s decisions in Buchanan versus Warley (1917) and Shelley versus Kraemer (1948), and the UDHR, could prohibit American Samoa from enforcing race-based land ownership restrictions if lawmakers extended citizenship, equal protection, or due process to American Samoa. Members of Congress, however, believed that the Court’s past rulings in the Insular Cases, models set in other unincorporated territories (e.g., the Philippines and Hawaii), and Federal Indian law established legal precedents that meant Samoans would be able to continue restricting land ownership on the basis of race if they became U.S. citizens and were governed by equal protection and due process. Samoan leaders demonstrated the unsettled nature of constitutional law in American politics by emphasizing that any congressional act that extended citizenship, equal protection, or due process to American Samoa would ultimately be reviewed and interpreted by the Court. For these Samoans, even if members of Congress were interpreting past Court precedents correctly, a future majority of justices could adopt a different understanding of what the extension of U.S. citizenship, equal protection, or due process meant for American Samoa by ruling that non-Samoans had fundamental constitutional rights to land ownership in American Samoa. This article thus helps explain how and why Samoan and naval leaders influenced U.S. lawmakers when Congress was considering legislation that would extend citizenship, equal protection, and due process protections to American Samoa in 1949. This legal history demonstrates how different interpretations of the Constitution, the UDHR, and fundamental rights influenced various actors within the context of the U.S. empire, illuminating the ambiguous nature of constitutional law in the U.S. unincorporated territories.

Bank for International Settlements

Agreement between the Government of Canada and the Bank for International Settlements on the Establishment of an Office of the Bank in Canada for the Operation of the BIS Innovation Hub Toronto Centre

Laundering the proceeds of crime presents a fundamental threat to competitive markets, security and the well-being of European consumers. This paper examines the new European Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA), created as part of the 2024 EU AML package to raise supervisory standards and coordinate the fight against illicit finance across the internal market. Drawing on a collective-action perspective, the paper conceptualises AML as the provision of a public good that is undermined by clarity problems (divergent “rules-in-use” and expectations) and credibility problems (uneven likelihood and severity of consequences for non-compliance). It argues that AMLA is best understood as a hybrid decentralised authority that combines classification functions (single rulebook, technical standards, supervisory methodologies, common templates) with selective enforcement tools (direct supervision of high-risk cross-border groups and escalation mechanisms vis-à-vis national authorities), supported by enhanced coordination infrastructures. By framing these features of the EU AML regime as collective-action problems, the paper sheds new light on the strengths and limits of AMLA’s hybrid model for policing money laundering and contributes to wider debates about the effectiveness of AML policing and its role in supporting anti-corruption efforts.

In its 2021 Model Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement, Canada has sought to preserve regulatory flexibility by using terms like “legitimate policy objectives,” “legitimate public policy objectives,” and “legitimate public welfare objectives.” How can this threefold distinction of “legitimate objectives” impact the interpretation of international investment obligations? Through an analysis of the content of international investment agreements and awards from tribunals that have expressly referred to these terms, this article argues that various forms of “legitimate objectives” do not encapsulate distinct legally significant terms and could lead to unintended consequences.

Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023, a rich body of legal scholarship has tackled various legal issues arising from Israel’s overall military conduct. One issue that has received very little attention is Israel’s destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage. In this article, I demonstrate how Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s cultural heritage has been facilitated through reliance on sources and language of law. Considering this unprecedented level of destruction, I examine the role of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in applying protection and accountability measures in response to the ongoing destruction of Palestinian heritage. I suggest that these three organizations provide the State of Palestine with an entry point to demand recognition, protection, and accountability for the destruction of this heritage. Rather than approaching each organization as an end in itself, I propose engaging with the three organizations simultaneously as tools to be utilized.

EU policy documents often present the green and digital transitions as “twinned” and mutually beneficial. However, it is now widely acknowledged that new technologies, such as AI, have significant environmental costs. This awareness has induced the EU to recalibrate its approach to the twin transition and prompted the elaboration of new soft-law principles of digital sustainability, an early form of “eco-digital constitutionalism” at EU level. This paper examines the national AI strategies of the twenty-seven Member States to assess the extent to which this revised approach of the EU is reflected at the national level. Our analysis reveals that the strategies in question often differ starkly in the manner in which they prioritise the various matters that pertain to the intersection of environment and AI. We argue that these inconsistencies, which are rooted in different attitudes to the economics of innovation, cannot be solved fully through soft-law harmonisation.

Neoliberalism, once an economic doctrine responding to the failures of liberalism, has become a widely used concept in sociolegal scholarship. Law and society scholars often invoke it to explain sociolegal and punitive phenomena such as mass incarceration, inequality, and state transformation. But the concept’s analytic power is undermined when scholars conflate neoliberalism as a sociohistorical process with neoliberalism as a universal cause. Drawing on an intellectual history of neoliberalism’s evolving meanings, I identify two problems – ubiquity and a lack of counterfactual imagination – that limit its theoretical utility in sociolegal research. I argue that neoliberalism should be theorized as a contingent, sociohistorical process; only then can it function as a theory with meaningful consequents.