International human rights law may serve as a language through which lawyers and others describe the harms resulting from corruption, but this approach has significant limitations as a legal framework. Despite a growing emphasis among scholars and practitioners on a human rights approach to the problem of corruption, this body of law does not provide a strong basis for addressing such conduct. International human rights treaties make no mention of corruption, and human rights treaty bodies have not brought conceptual clarity to the question of how corruption violates or undermines human rights. Given that human rights law binds States alone, it is also ill-suited to a phenomenon that typically occurs at the intersection of the public and private sectors. Even as a language for describing how corruption harms social and economic rights, human rights law has its limitations, some of which come into relief when compared with the field of development economics.

This contribution considers why states as well as international courts and tribunals should act to remedy the gender imbalance on international benches. In my view, the most appropriate question is not why they must, but why they should. Arguments that states are legally bound under the UN Charter to address this gender imbalance are weak, though human rights law does provide a basis for claims that states must take action. But arguments about legitimacy—both normative and sociological—could provide a more persuasive basis for arguing that states as well as courts and tribunals should act. In particular, the normative legitimacy of international courts and tribunals could benefit from selection procedures designed to help ensure that states nominate the most meritorious candidates for judgeships.

In the summer of 2014 I attended a conference panel on international lawyers as public intellectuals. The academics on the panel talked about their twitter accounts, their blogs, their occasional radio and television appearances, and their opinion-editorials in major newspapers. The discussion really focused not on whether international lawyers should be public intellectuals, but on how they can do so, and what the ramifications of such public engagement can be. What struck me most, however, was a notable omission: no one on the panel or in the audience mentioned books as a medium through which public international lawyers might reach a mass audience. In reflecting on this omission I realized that academics in this field do not, for the most part, write books for a general readership. To the extent that public international lawyers reach a mass audience at all, they have chosen do so through other means – with some exceptions.

On 1 July 2011 the UK Bribery Act 2010 and accompanying guidance finally came into force, marking the end of years of controversy about how and when the United Kingdom would implement the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. The United Kingdom's very delayed implementation of the Convention provoked an increasingly threatening response from the OECD Working Group on Bribery, and highlighted this body's lack of binding enforcement procedures. By contrast, the OECD's reliance on non-binding guidelines has proved successful in that the UK Guidance draws heavily upon the OECD's guidance on how corporations should prevent the bribery of foreign public officials.

This article examines private sector complicity in governmental corruption that violates economic and social rights. Although banks and multinational corporations typically play critical roles in facilitating the diversion of public revenues away from the provision of social services, the link between the private sector, corruption, and human rights violations remains underexplored. This article therefore examines this relationship and explores the viability of a standard for assessing the complicity of the private sector in such violations of economic and social rights. Ultimately, the state-centred nature of the international human rights system limits the utility of any complicity standard for non-state actors.