This book offers a bold new perspective on how international adjudication operates.
While international courts claim to decide all disputes over which they have jurisdiction, this book argues that sometimes they strategically choose not to. Through detailed case studies and a close analysis of international procedural law, it reveals that courts decide most disputes most of the time - but not all.
By unpacking how courts use doctrines of jurisdiction and admissibility to avoid or narrow down certain issues, the book exposes the covert techniques of judicial avoidance. It shows how the flexibility of international procedural law allows judges to manage politically sensitive disputes without openly acknowledging that they are relying on avoidance doctrines.
This book offers a nuanced and realistic account of international adjudication, one that recognises how legal principle is often weighed against political and practical realities.
L’interpretazione del diritto internazionale consuetudinario costituisce una delle questioni più complesse e dibattute della teoria e della pratica del diritto internazionale contemporaneo. Tradizionalmente, l’analisi di tale fonte del diritto si è concentrata esclusivamente sul momento della sua identificazione, attraverso la ricerca della prassi e dell’opinio iuris. Questo approccio, tuttavia, ha lasciato poco esplorato il successivo momento della determinazione del significato e della portata delle norme consuetudinarie. La presente monografia tenta di colmare simile lacuna. Attraverso un’analisi sistematica della prassi degli Stati e della giurisprudenza internazionale, si offre un quadro metodologico per comprendere i criteri che governano l’interpretazione del diritto consuetudinario. L’indagine mostra come l’attività interpretativa rivesta un ruolo fondamentale non soltanto nell’applicazione di norme consuetudinarie previamente identificate alle fattispecie concrete sopravvenute, ma anche nel coordinamento tra la consuetudine e le altre fonti del diritto, nella prevenzione e nella risoluzione di antinomie, nonché nell’adattamento di simile fonte ai mutamenti di fatto e di diritto. L’opera si rivolge a studiosi e operatori del diritto internazionale che intendano approfondire le dinamiche teoriche sottese all’interpretazione della consuetudine internazionale.
Human rights institutions are under stress around the world. Threats of non-compliance, denunciation, and other forms of backlash are more likely in the current context than in the recent past. But it is also the case that social movements from a greater variety of ideological camps are engaging with international human rights law and institutions. In this essay, we explore the rise of moral conservative engagement with the inter-American human rights system (IAHRS) and consider the implications for the future of human rights. These actors have grown in sophistication and number since they first began to engage with the IAHRS in the early 2010s on issues of gender, sexuality, and reproductive justice. Today, they work through highly successful Transnational Activists Networks (TANs) that encompass academic circles and political actors in positions of significant power. We argue that greater engagement by moral conservatives with the IAHRS may help it survive Latin America's "revolution to the right"-the dramatic recent rise of far-right governments in the region, some with authoritarian tendencies. Survival, however, may come at a cost.
Love letters, travel updates, expressions of grief, boredom, excitement, and longing: this book brings together more than 150 postcards written by passengers aboard the Lotus, a French liner that connected Marseille with the great ports of the eastern Mediterranean between 1898 and 1931. Written by pilgrims and poets, soldiers and scholars, royals and revolutionaries, the messages offer rare glimpses into everyday life during one of the most transformative periods of modern history.
An afterword explores the ship’s enduring legal legacy as the vessel at the center of international law’s famous Lotus Case of 1927.
This is the first book to comprehensively explore the role of solidarity in international disaster response law (IDRL), offering a timely and transformative vision for this regime governing cooperation in disaster response.
As disasters intensify due to climate change, solidarity is increasingly invoked by states and others as a principle guiding disaster response. Yet its role remains underexplored and underutilised, risking solidarity to function as a mere rhetorical device. This book responds to that gap, offering a comprehensive examination of the meaning, legal status and implications of solidarity in IDRL. It demonstrates solidarity can reorient IDRL from a sovereignty-centred regime characterised by state autonomy and voluntarism to one focused on the protection of disaster-affected persons through differentiated international cooperation and assistance.
The book further explores how solidarity could reshape specific legal and practical issues that challenge international disaster response. By analysing these issues through the lens of solidarity, the book offers novel perspectives that can break new ground in finding concrete solutions for persistent challenges within the regime.
This analysis comes at a pivotal moment. In 2024, the United Nations initiated negotiations for a multilateral convention for international disaster response, signalling growing recognition of the need for a universal treaty in this area. Against this backdrop, the book is both timely and ambitious. It not only exposes the untapped potential of solidarity but also provides a practical roadmap for its implementation, seeking to shape the development of IDRL to meet the demands of an increasingly disaster-prone world.
This book sets out a legality-centred model to better understand the interpretation of crimes in international criminal law.
It offers a new way of understanding the interpretation of crime as a two-dimensional process: determining what the law is and interpreting whether that law in fact criminalises the conduct in question. This model affects the process and the outcome of judicial interpretation. The book moves beyond the abstract by applying the model to two case studies: (1) organisational policy as a contextual element of crimes against humanity, and (2) the crime of forced marriage. It brings often-overlooked criminal law theory into the field of international criminal law, offering a fresh, innovative perspective on interpretation and placing the legality principle back at the centre of crime interpretation.
Torture and the Recognition of Psychological Suffering in International Law finds that psychological suffering has posed difficulties for international human rights advocates and adjudicators working on the prohibition of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. A systematic survey of the relevant international caselaw, the book presents, reveals a vast variation in how psychological suffering is found to violate the prohibition (or not). When singled out in cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT), psychological suffering has never been specifically categorized as torture. What is more, psychological suffering has often been excluded altogether from the purview of the prohibition, categorized instead as ‘lawful sanctions’ or as falling below the ‘minimum level of severity’ threshold, and therefore not found to be a violation. Coupling caselaw analysis and interviews, this book provides numerous inter-related reasons: that socio-political standards recognizing the significance of psychological suffering are selectively applied or altogether overlooked; that categorization is subject to caution and conservatism; that scientific expertise documenting health impacts has not compelled adjudicators in all cases; and that interpretation still depends on sense-centric reasoning (intuition–emotion–presumption), potentially undercutting scientific expertise and perpetuating preconceptions associating severe suffering with the physical.
The latest volume of the Yearbook of International Disaster Law (Vol. 7, 2024) is out. Contents include:
The Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law has issued a call for submissions for its Volume 30 for contributions for "a special thematic forum examining a central yet relatively under-explored dimension of international law in practice: the structure, functioning, and evolution of the diverse institutions and entities that comprise the wider United Nations (UN) system, including subsidiary organs, specialised agencies, related organisations, and other components of the broader UN-centred multilateral framework." The call is here. Abstracts are due by August 28, 2026. The norm against conquest—a central tenet of the international order—is eroding. This study is among the first to examine public support for this norm, using a real-world case: Israel’s seizure of Syrian territory following the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024. Our survey experiment in Israel reveals that citizens are sensitive to the prohibition on conquest. They demonstrate greater support for an occupation that involves only military control of the forcibly seized territory and weaker support for civilian settlement in or annexation of the foreign territory: policies that amount to conquest. Our finding—a stronger preference for legally acceptable occupation over illegal settlement or annexation—sends a positive signal for the constraining power of norms.
The war in Ukraine has tested core elements of contemporary international law. Against this backdrop, the continued viability of neutrality under international law has come under renewed scrutiny. This volume brings together experts from Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy to examine the issue from the perspectives of international, public, and European law, as well as history. They conclude that, within the United Nations peace-law framework, states are obliged to show solidarity with the victim of aggression, and that neutrality may ultimately jeopardize even the security of neutral states.
The latest issue of the International Review of the Red Cross (Vol. 108, no. 931, 2026) is out. The theme is: "Upholding Humanity in War." Contents include: 
The latest issue of the Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy (Vol. 29, no. 3, 2026) is out. Contents include: 
The latest issue of the International Criminal Law Review (Vol. 26, no. 4, 2026) is out. Contents include: 
The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 18, no. 2, July 2026) is out. Contents include: 
The latest volume of the Australian International Law Journal (Vol. 31, 2024) is out. Contents include: 
The latest issue of the Harvard International Law Journal (Vol. 67, no. 2, Spring 2026) is out. Contents include: 
The latest issue of the Yale Journal of International Law (Vol. 51, no. 2, 2026) is out. Contents include: 
The latest issue of International Organization (Vol. 80, no. 3, Summer 2026) is out. Contents include: