The Mixed Claims Commission, United States and Germany, is nearing the completion of its labors. It has considered about 12,000 claims, of which about 7,000 have been entirely disallowed. The claims as originally instituted amounted to some $1,480,000,000, including the government claim for reimbursement of Rhine Army costs, a claim not pressed. The awards to American citizens and corporations will amount, it is estimated, to about $125,000,000 principal and about $50,000,000 interest (to January, 1926), a total of about $175,000,000; the government's claims for subrogation as an insurer on maritime losses, for lost Shipping Board vessels, and in the Veterans’ Bureau, will amount, with interest, to about $60,000,000. Considering that the treaty under which these awards were made established rules of liability and damages widely exceeding the rules of international law, the ratio between awards and claims is probably not far in excess of the average, which is comparatively small. It may also be said that the commission, dealing with 12,000 claims in approximately three years, has established a record for speedy adjudications never before achieved. A critique of the decisions and opinions of the commission down to January, 1925, was essayed in an editorial comment published in this Journal, Volume XIX, p. 133. The present article will undertake to consider the decisions and opinions rendered during 1925. These practically conclude the decisive judicial work of the commission.

The Foreign Claims Settlement Commission (Commission or FCSC) was granted jurisdiction to determine the validity and amounts of certain claims by U.S. nationals against Iran by the Iran Claims Act and the 1990 Settlement Agreement (lump sum settlement) between the United States and Iran. The Iran Claims Act, a 1985 statute enacted in anticipation of the lump sum agreement settling U.S. “small claims” against Iran, required the Commission to apply:

1. (1) the terms of any settlement agreement [lump sum settlement];

2. (2) the relevant provisions of the Declarations of the Government of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria of January 19, 1981, giving consideration to interpretations thereof by the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal; and

3. (3) applicable principles of international law, justice, and equity.

In Garcia-Mir, the district court found that prolonged detention of the undocumented aliens was, in the circumstances, “arbitrary,” and therefore a violation of international law. But it also held that even though it was in violation of international law, the courts would not order an end to the detention because it had been authorized by the Attorney General. The court of appeals affirmed.

In “Judicialization of the Sea: Bargaining in the Shadow of UNCLOS,” Sara Mitchell and Andrew Owsiak make an important contribution to the literature that considers if and how international courts influence the behavior of states beyond the process of adjudication. Their analysis shows that states that declare an Article 287 choice for dispute resolution when signing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) are more likely to solve their conflicts in peaceful ways, compared to signatories who do not, suggesting this relationship is not epiphenomenal. Their finding provides us with yet another piece of the puzzle in understanding how legalization and judicialization shape the behavior of states. We still, however, have much to learn about how states interact with legalization and adjudication. This essay argues that while the article's statistical analysis adds to the evidence that judicialization influences state behavior, the uniqueness of UNCLOS makes it doubtful that we can replicate this finding for other international courts and tribunals. In addition, while the statistical analysis suggests that states that make Article 287 declarations behave differently in the face of maritime conflict, we do not really know why states made the choice to declare a preference for adjudication. Finally, given that states strongly prefer negotiations to using UNCLOS formal adjudication mechanisms, we need to understand better the path to adjudication or arbitration.

The fundamental role of international law is to provide a framework for the coexistence of and cooperation among states. If international law and institutions work well, their contribution to the management of international affairs remains in the background. This essay seeks to illuminate the largely unnoticed work of river commissions in preventing and resolving cross-border water disputes. Among the oldest of international organizations, river commissions have long been at the forefront of technical and diplomatic interactions between countries. Similar to other international organizations, river commissions were created to better coordinate interstate interactions and more efficiently pursue common goals. They differ from other international organisations in the focus on water, a unique substance that cuts across so many aspects of human existence and requires specific treatment depending on the hydrological, political, social and economic context. Given the diversity of the contexts, river commissions differ from each other in their design and the tasks assigned to them. Therefore, a river commission is an umbrella term that encompasses a diversity of joint arrangements for cooperation between the riparian countries over their shared waters. This essay argues that river commissions helped to prevent, mitigate, and resolve many cross-border water disputes by building communities over water, enhancing technical knowledge and routinizing organisational transformations.

In the last few years, states have advanced various proposals for cooperation in the use of countermeasures. In this Article, we ask whether, and if so under what conditions, states may lawfully collaborate in the taking of countermeasures against other states. We distinguish five different types of collaboration: (1) independent but coordinated action; (2) secondment; (3) joint action; (4) aid and assistance; and (5) what we term “proxy countermeasures”—the idea of taking a measure at the request and on behalf of another state. We consider the permissibility of each, both where the acting state is itself entitled to resort to countermeasures and where it is not. We also draw attention to certain legal and policy considerations relating to, and to plausible avenues for, the development of international law.

On April 11, 1994, approximately two thousand men, women, and children were brutally murdered by armed Hutu extremists after a group of Belgian UN peacekeepers abandoned the school facility where they had sought refuge upon the outbreak of the Rwandan genocide. Almost a quarter of a century later, the Brussels Court of Appeal (Court) on June 8, 2018 concluded the civil proceedings lodged by a number of Rwandan survivors and relatives against the Belgian commanding officers and the Belgian state. Overturning an earlier judgment of the Brussels Court of First Instance, the Court held that the decision to retreat from the facility was imputable only to the United Nations, to the exclusion of the Belgian authorities. Accordingly, the claims against the Belgian state were unfounded. The events—which inspired the movie Shooting Dogs (2005)—bear obvious similarities to the role of the United Nations Protection Force's (UNPROFOR) Dutch battalion (Dutchbat) in the evacuation of the Potoçari camp and the ensuing genocide of seven thousand Bosnian men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995. Like the Dutch judgments in the (more well-known) Mothers of Srebrenica proceedings, the Mukeshimana appellate judgment provides a rare national court precedent that considers the imputability of the conduct of peacekeepers to troop-contributing countries. The Mukeshimana judgment, however, raises a high bar for finding such imputability.

A topic motivating much research since 2016 is the turn away from international law caused by a surge in non-liberal and nationalist governments across the world. In the realm of human rights law, scholars have noted how states are now more apt to repudiate, resist, or simply ignore their human rights obligations. This essay makes a different cut into this topic. It considers not how non-liberal actors reject human rights law, but rather what happens when they embrace it. International human rights law in Latin America—often understood as a means of promoting a cosmopolitan, liberal political order—is also being harnessed toward other types of political projects. This raises the question of how necessary the link is between human rights and political liberalism: is non-liberal engagement an existential threat, or can human rights law have a thinner commitment to liberal principles than does, for example, national constitutional law? As the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) turns fifty, this essay argues that the human rights law of the Americas is open-ended enough that it can incorporate, and has at times incorporated, non-liberal concerns and norms without losing coherence or legitimacy. Further, this may be an apt survival strategy, albeit not the only one, for the region's human rights institutions in our time.

In “Achieving Sex-Representative International Court Benches,” Nienke Grossman begins with embarrassing statistics. Despite decades of progress on gender equality, women are still quite scarce on international benches. Grossman reframes the debate on gender equity in a powerful way. Most promisingly, she suggests that greater meritocracy and greater gender equity go hand in hand. As she argues, “international judgeships are often used to reward political loyalty” and “political horse-trading among states” abounds. For these reasons, reforms to broaden the pool of candidates and to increase the transparency of the selection process would also result in the appointment of more women, in all likelihood. In addition, Grossman puts forth a provocative legal claim—she argues that “states are legally required to take steps to understand and remedy the paucity of women judges on most international court benches.”

With the expansion of European imperialism, public health concerns became globalized, necessitating cooperation with other imperial powers for the treatment and prevention of diseases. This essay traces the role of race and racism in the development of global public health law. It explores the connections, legacies, vestiges, and important disjunctions between tropical medicine and global public health, and considers the primacy given to white health as one of the animating purposes behind the emergence of the global public health regime. The centrality of protecting the health and interests of white people then and now continues to inform the global health agenda. This essay surfaces the role of international law through omission and commission in structuring and reifying racialized hierarchies of care and concern. It concludes that transformational reforms aimed at addressing this legacy are necessary.

Most trade scholars treat agriculture as a commodity, and in a sense, agriculture workers and their technological replacements as commodities as well. From a food sovereignty perspective, however, agriculture is part of a food system and what is at stake in trade law is people's way of life. Peasants' and Indigenous peoples’ (and workers’) resistance against the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been an existential struggle. Most trade law scholars, with notable exceptions, have ignored social movements’ demands, including their call to end the WTO. By in effect disregarding the costs and violence of the existing trade system against food producers, trade scholarship makes social movements’ language and political demands less cognizable in international law. In this essay, I provide some context and language that may encourage trade law scholars to engage with the food sovereignty movement. I first explain what is at stake in trade law for the food sovereignty movements. I then briefly describe the underlying three pillars supporting the Agreement on Agriculture, and highlight the limits of trade law. I conclude by offering three principles—dignity, self-sufficiency, and solidarity—that could open trade law to wider perspectives. These principles blur the line between trade and the right to food in order to ensure that neither one is dominant nor an “other.”