The international order that the United States has for decades led and maintained is undergoing dramatic change. In this Essay, we explain that international law during this period was constituted with, and dependent on, U.S. power; that the two became (in odd-couple fashion) entwined together; and that, as the international order changes, the international legal system, its content and its architecture, will also inevitably change.

The international legal norm that prohibits forcible annexations of territory is foundational to modern international law. It lies at the core of three projects that have been central to the enterprise: (1) to settle title to territory as the basis for establishing state authority; (2) to regulate the use of force across settled borders; and (3) to provide for people within settled borders collectively to determine their own fates. Prohibiting forcible annexations is integral to each of these projects independently, and by tying them together, has had a transformative effect on the legal system as a whole. However, its significance is widely overlooked or misunderstood. Analysts have also largely failed to appreciate that it is now caught up in a broader contest over the future world order and at risk of erosion.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, initiated on February 24, 2022, is among the most—if not the most—significant shocks to the global order since World War II. This piece assesses the stakes of the invasion for the core principles that lie at the heart of contemporary international law and the world order that it has helped to create. We argue, relying in part on the other contributions to the October 2022 agora on Ukraine in the American Journal of International Law, that however this war ends, it will reshape, in ways large and small, the world we all inhabit.

Good afternoon. I am Monica Hakimi. I am from the University of Michigan Law School, and it is my pleasure to moderate this panel on the recent invasion in Ukraine. The invasion has caused me, as I suspect it has caused many of you, a great deal of horror, sadness, and fear. We hope to spend the hour today interrogating the question of what the invasion means for jus ad bellum, in particular, and for the international legal order more generally.

Hi, everyone. I am Monica Hakimi from the University of Michigan Law School, and I would like to welcome you to our panel on cyber power and its limits. The topic almost does not need an introduction. We all know just from reading the news that our collective dependence on cyberspace is also a huge vulnerability, and state and non-state actors exploit this vulnerability to do one another harm. They use cyber technologies not just to spy on one another, but also, for example, to interfere in national elections, to steal trade secrets or other valuable information, to disrupt the activities of political, military, or economic institutions, and at times to cause physical destruction or death.

In this paper, a high-gain dual-band distributed amplifier (DBDA) based on the metamaterial transmission line (TL) is proposed. To have two separate frequency bands in the distributed amplifiers, the composite right/left-handed (CRLH) TLs are used instead of conventional TLs. Although both forward and reverse gains of the distributed amplifiers are available in this case, they suffer from their low gains. In this paper, to increase the DBDA power gain, a new circuit architecture for the CRLH TL is introduced. By using the proposed CRLH TL, a lower wave attenuation coefficient at the forward band of the DBDA is achieved than the conventional structures, which causes a higher forward power gain. Simulation results also show that the power gain of the proposed DBDA is about 28.5 dB at the desired frequency bands, and good agreement between the measurement and simulation results confirms the accuracy of the design method.

This article argues that a form of legal regulation is embodied in decisions at the UN Security Council that condone but do not formally authorize specific military operations. Such decisions sometimes inflect or go beyond what the jus ad bellum permits through its general standards—that is, under the prohibition of cross-border force and small handful of exceptions. Recognizing that this form of regulation is both part of the law and different in kind from regulation through the general standards should change how we think about the jus ad bellum.

This is the panel on the use of defensive force against non-state actors. We thought we would use the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, to take stock on where we are on the question of when, if ever, states may use defensive force against non-state actors in other states.

The United States is more than fifteen years into a fight against terrorism that shows no sign of abating and, with the change in administration, appears to be intensifying. Other Western democracies that have historically been uneasy about U.S. counterterrorism policies have, in recent years, shifted toward those policies. And armed nonstate groups continue to commit large-scale acts of violence in multiple distinct theaters. The legal issues that these situations present are not entirely new, but neither are they going away. Recent publications, like the three works under review, thus provide useful opportunities to reflect on and refine our thinking on them.

A miniaturized substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) power divider with embedded filter response and arbitrary power-dividing ratio loaded by open complementary split-ring resonators (OCSRRs) is presented. In the proposed power divider, the miniaturization and filtering response are realized by a pair of OCSRRs, which are etched on the metal cover of the SIW structure. The design procedure indicates that the power division ratio can be adjusted by changing the locations of the output ports. In this study, three miniaturized filtering SIW power dividers with different power division ratios (1:1, 1:4, and 1:8) are implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed structure on the size reduction. These power dividers (1:1, 1:4, and 1:8) have the overall sizes of 0.31λg × 0.14λg, 0.25λg × 0.17λg, and 0.25λg × 0.18λg, respectively. The measured results also agree well with the simulated results.

The purpose of this work was to evaluate the capacity of existing landscape irrigation equipment to deliver the expected irrigation depth at a level of uniformity that can potentially be used in a precision irrigation management environment. Popular pop-up sprayer systems from two leading manufacturers (Rain-bird and Hunter variable arc and fixed arc nozzles) were subject to spatial distribution tests, in order to establish the application patterns under ideal conditions. The results indicate that it is not possible to fully rely on the catalog application depth values, with some variable arc nozzles applying up to 200% of the catalog values. These nozzles can have low values of uniformity, with Christiansen´s uniformity coefficient, CU, of between 0.31 and 0.70, making it difficult to obtain good uniformity even under a back-to-back setting. These results indicate that variable arc nozzles are not recommended for use in precision agriculture. It is preferable to use fixed arc nozzles, after actual field evaluation.

What unites states and other global actors around a shared governance project? How does the group—what I will call an “international community”—coalesce and stay engaged in the enterprise? A frequent assumption is that an international community is cemented by its members’ commonalities and depleted by their intractable disagreements. This article critiques that assumption and presents, as an alternative, a theory that accounts for the combined integration and discord that actually characterize most global governance associations. I argue that conflict, especially conflict that manifests in law, is not necessarily corrosive to an international community. To the contrary, it often is a unifying force that helps constitute and fortify the community and support the governance project. As such, international legal conflict can have systemic value for the global order, even when it lacks substantive resolution. The implications for the design and practice of international law are far-reaching.

As many readers are aware, Bond v. United States is a quirky case. The federal government prosecuted under the implementing legislation for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) a betrayed wife who used chemical agents to try to harm her husband’s lover. The wife argued that, as applied to her, the implementing legislation violated the Tenth Amendment. She thus raised difficult questions about the scope of the treaty power and of Congress’s authority to implement treaties through the Necessary and Proper Clause. The Bond Court avoided those questions with a clear statement rule: “we can insist on a clear indication that Congress meant to reach purely local crimes, before interpreting the statute’s expansive language in a way that intrudes on the police power of the States.” This resolution betrays the Court’s ambivalence about the appropriate limits of the treaty power and about the Court’s own capacity to define those limits.

On August 29, 2016, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (Tribunal) sentenced a corporate media enterprise and one of its employees for contemptuously interfering with the Tribunal's proceedings in Ayyash, a prosecution concerning the February 2005 terrorist attack that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The contempt decision is significant for two reasons: (1) it adopts an expansive definition of the crime of contempt to restrict a journalist's freedom of expression; and (2) it is the first international judicial decision to hold a corporate entity criminally responsible.

Incineration or disposal of carbon fiber waste from the aircraft industry leads to serious energy consumption and environmental pollution. The use of this waste as reinforcement is a wise approach to appreciate the high performance of the carbon fiber. In this study, the sliding wear and frictional behavior of recycled carbon fiber prepreg (rCFP) reinforced polypropylene (PP) prepared via melt compounding method using an internal mixer were studied. The samples were categorized into PP reinforced by carbon fiber with resin (A) and carbon fiber without resin (B). Pin-on-disc method was utilized to evaluate the effect of rCFP content and physical condition of fibers on tribological performance of the composites. The results were supported by morphological analyses using scanning electron microscopy. It was found that polymer composites B for rCFP without resin exhibited better tribological performance than composites category-A. The addition of rCFP into PP was observed to increase its wear resistance with minimum coefficient of friction achieved at 3 wt% of rCFP content for both polymer composites.