This Article examines how World Athletics, a private regulatory body, has shaped the legal norm of gender equality. Focusing on three landmark legal challenges to World Athletics’ regulation of gender, this Article shows how the organization has constructed the meaning of gender equality as it has pursued global, monopolistic, and autonomous authority. World Athletics has retrofitted this norm to align with its longstanding regulatory practices by essentializing women, coopting rivalrous actors, and depoliticizing sex. In doing so, the organization has repeatedly construed and constrained the meaning of gender equality to bolster its private regulatory authority.

Can treaty terms be implied? And, if so, what does that mean? This Article draws on concepts from the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics to analyze how the rules on treaty interpretation allow, in exceptional cases, for the identification of implied terms in otherwise express treaty texts. Its key insight is that implied terms fit within the framework of Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and are derived from the associated interpretation of express terms. They cannot be derived from a separate process—and indeed such a separate process is not possible under the positive law.

The International Law Commission (Commission or ILC) held its seventy-fifth session at its seat in Geneva from April 15 to May 31 and from July 1 to August 2, 2024. The Commission was chaired by Mr. Marcelo Vázquez-Bermúdez (Ecuador), and for the first time since its establishment in 1945, elected a majority of three females out of the five officers elected to its bureau annually. The Commission celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary and progressed its work on the topics in the program of work despite the shortening of the twelve-week General Assembly approved session to ten weeks due to the liquidity crisis facing the United Nations. Following the resignation of two of its members, one upon his election to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the other for personal reasons, the Commission elected two new members from Romania and China to fill the casual vacancies that arose as a result.

Today export controls are all over the news. The so-called October rules regulating U.S. advanced semi-conductor chip exports to China represent a significant expansion of U.S. efforts to control the export of upstream advanced technology where the direct military applications remain unknowable. The U.S. sanctions and export control policy against Russia involve the most far-ranging and internationally coordinated export control regime since the end of the Cold War. If the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party get their way, export controls will become even more central to U.S. economic policy vis-à-vis China, and even more trade and research-collaboration restrictive. Not for the first time, U.S. export control policy is being called an act of economic war.