On November 4, 2019, the Trump administration notified the United Nations that the United States was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, prompting expressions of regret from a number of countries. Although President Trump had announced in June 2017 that the United States intended to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, its terms had prevented the United States from giving formal notice of withdrawal until November 4, 2019. The withdrawal will take effect on November 4, 2020. Domestically, the governors of many U.S. states responded to the withdrawal by reaffirming their commitment to the goals of the Paris Agreement, consistent with recurring tensions between the Trump administration and progressive states with respect to climate. In another major manifestation of these tensions, on October 23, 2019, the United States sued California over the state's cap-and-trade agreement with Quebec, Canada, alleging that this agreement is an unconstitutional exercise of foreign affairs powers.

On November 15, 2019, President Trump pardoned or otherwise removed punishments for three members of the military—Lieutenant Clint Lorance, Major Mathew Golsteyn, and Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher—who had been found to commit, or had allegedly committed, criminal acts abroad that amounted to war crimes. These actions follow Trump's May 2019 pardon of First Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been found guilty of murdering a detainee in Iraq. These intrusions into military proceedings were an unusual use of the president's pardon power and have raised concerns about the U.S. commitment to international humanitarian law.

Over the last few years, the United States has been pressuring the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reform the Appellate Body by refusing proposals to fill vacancies. On December 10, 2019, the terms of two Appellate Body members expired, leaving one member left for the seven-member body. This has brought new appeals to a standstill, as an appeal from a panel established by the Dispute Settlement Body must be heard by three Appellate Body members. In February of 2020, the United States elaborated on its complaints about the Appellate Body in a report published by the Office of the United States Trade Representative. In the spring of 2020, in response to the continued U.S. resistance to filling vacancies on the Appellate Body, a group of WTO members established an interim arrangement to handle appeals through arbitration. Also in the spring of 2020, the United States described as invalid a recent Appellate Body report regarding a dispute between Canada and the United States, asserting that none of the three persons who issued the report were in fact bona fide Appellate Body members.

Any meaningful human rights law approach to COVID-19 must be holistic and recognize the breadth of the challenges to both economic, social, and cultural rights, and civil and political rights. It must be grounded in the threat posed by the disease but also address responses to it, and implicate a wide range of state and nonstate actors. Such an analysis should offer a positive vision of effective global reaction, and counter attempts to hijack rights to oppose legitimate pandemic measures.

In the fall of 2019, the Trump administration reached several trade arrangements, some of them tentative, with important U.S. trade partners. On October 11, 2019, China and the United States announced a preliminary trade deal subject to finalization—one that came after more than a year of escalating tariffs. Just a week earlier, the United States had signed two trade agreements with Japan, one regarding tariff reductions and the other regarding digital trade. None of these deals appear to require subsequent congressional approval in the eyes of the executive branch, unlike the earlier United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA), which was signed in November 2018 and whose fate in Congress appears promising as of mid-December of 2019. In addition to these trade arrangements, the fall of 2019 saw several developments in trade relations between the United States and the European Union tied to the long-running trade disputes.

The Trump administration released an updated policy on landmine use on January 31, 2020, significantly changing the prior U.S. policy. Whereas previously the United States supported landmine use only on the Korean peninsula, the revised policy now allows for the universal use of “non-persistent” landmines, i.e., those that have self-destruction mechanisms and self-deactivation features. This policy significantly diverges from provisions of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction (Ottawa Convention), a treaty to which the United States is not a party but which has widespread international support.

On January 3, 2020, the U.S. military conducted a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport that killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader within the Iranian military of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Trump administration initially appeared to justify the strike as an effort to deter imminent attacks on U.S. embassies and personnel, but later insisted that Iran's actions in the months leading up to the strike triggered the U.S. right to self-defense. Domestically, the Trump administration claimed the authority to carry out the strike based on both the president's inherent constitutional powers and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq passed by Congress in 2002. In the aftermath of the strike, Iraq voted to expel U.S. troops from its territory, and Iran conducted a missile strike on American bases in Iraq. Iran also announced that it would cease to observe limits on its production of nuclear fuel—a core tenet of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), from which the United States withdrew in 2018.

While the global pandemic has exposed the fragility of human rights protections, it has also resulted in rights victories for some of the most vulnerable members of society. This Essay examines epistemic, consequentialist, and normative rights reframing efforts that have been mobilized to advocate for and secure human rights during the pandemic through the lens of prisoners’ rights. It argues that these rights seeking strategies hold promise for advancing rights claims of prisoners and other marginalized groups beyond the pandemic.

In this Essay, we analyze two sets of international legal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: the academic discussion on state responsibility; and the deployment of international law as a tool for resistance. We argue that both approaches made significant contributions but concealed the role of the discipline in the production of the conditions that led to the pandemic and its unequal impact. These interventions reflect a “modest international law”; an understanding of the discipline that hinders change and is ethically weak. We contend that repoliticization can help reclaim international law's ambition and responsibility.

Political instability and violence escalated in northeastern Syria in October 2019, following President Trump's decision to withdraw most U.S. troops from the country. Trump's decision left U.S.-backed Kurdish forces vulnerable to attacks by Turkey, intensifying an already dire humanitarian situation. Soon thereafter, Kurdish leaders negotiated an agreement with the Russian-backed Syrian government to fill the vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal. By late October, the president of Turkey agreed to a ceasefire in response to diplomatic and economic pressure from the United States and to the arrival of Russian and Syrian troops into northeastern Syria. Shortly thereafter, U.S. forces carried out a raid in northwestern Syria that resulted in the death of the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—a raid that relied in part on intelligence gathered earlier by Kurdish allies.

On February 29, 2020, the United States signed an “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” with the Taliban. The agreement provides that the United States and its allies will withdraw all forces from Afghanistan in stages over a fourteen-month period and that the Taliban will not allow actors within its controlled territory to attack the United States and its allies. The agreement contains additional provisions with respect to prisoner exchanges, sanctions relief, and future negotiations regarding a permanent ceasefire and broader political settlement that the Taliban will pursue with the government of Afghanistan. On the same day, the United States and Afghanistan issued a Joint Declaration reflecting some, though not all, of the terms of the U.S. agreement with the Taliban. Over the three months following the signing of the U.S. agreement with the Taliban, the parties have implemented some aspects of its terms. But others remain unfulfilled, despite the passage of deadlines.

President Trump first announced his plans for increasing U.S. military capabilities in space in 2018. In August 2019, his administration created the United States Space Command. With the passage in December 2019 of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the United States established the United States Space Force as a new branch of the armed forces. These developments do not directly implicate international law, but they reflect a growing divergence between the U.S. approach to space and that taken by the UN General Assembly.

This Essay considers how adjudicators could determine the end of the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic. Considerable work examines the beginning and existence of pandemics and emergencies. By contrast, when either of these two phenomena end remains underexplored—creating legal uncertainty. This Essay reviews how pandemics as biological and social events end, considers how international bodies have approached the end of emergencies, and assesses what this might mean for adjudicators deciding on the end of the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic and related public health emergency.

This review essay examines four edited volumes released in 2018 that address questions concerning the “legitimacy,” “authority,” and “performance” of international courts and tribunals (ICs). Each of the four volumes has a somewhat different focus.