The World Trade Organization is at an important institutional crossroads, buffeted by critique and with its once-heralded dispute system in doubt. Despite some achievements at the 2022 MC12 Ministerial Conference, the WTO appears in crisis, without a strong institutional mandate. In this Article, we offer a vision for its future, rooted in a particular interpretation of its past. The WTO's legal architecture is characterized by a resilient pluralism, which seeks to preserve diversity of governance models and regulatory approaches, both economic and political, in the domestic orders of member states. Despite strong pressures to impose a neoliberal vision of the state-market relationship on states, this pluralism has persevered; it offers a response to the WTO's critics and a mandate for the WTO's future.

Fines and other financial sanctions are frequently imposed by criminal justice systems around the world. Yet they also raise grave concerns about economic discrimination. Unless they are perfectly scaled to defendants’ financial circumstances, they will penalize poor persons far more than rich ones—and poor defendants’ inability to pay can lead to further penalties like imprisonment or additional financial sanctions. These “poverty penalties” have received attention in domestic jurisdictions but are understudied as a global phenomenon. This Article takes up this issue and makes three contributions. First, it demonstrates that poverty penalties are prevalent in criminal justice systems around the world. Second, it shows how poverty penalties came to be overlooked in international human rights law and describes how this is starting to change. Third, the Article makes the normative case for addressing poverty penalties within human rights law and offers suggestions for how this can be achieved.

Asset recovery is a fundamental principle of anti-corruption law, without which the financial damage from corruption cannot be repaired. Yet recovering assets is notoriously difficult and time-consuming, and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption provides little technical or institutional support to facilitate such returns. To remedy this, we propose the creation of a transnational asset recovery mechanism that could provide myriad services to states upon request, including gathering and publishing information, providing technical assistance and capacity building, helping to conclude agreements on asset return, and monitoring returned funds. Theoretically, we introduce the concepts of customizability and selectability to explain why a flexible transnational asset recovery mechanism has advantages over more formal international institutions, such as an international anti-corruption court. These benefits include lower financial and political costs, enhanced adaptability, and a greater likelihood of enhancing interstate cooperation regarding asset returns.

This Article argues that the Gulf Crisis of 1990–91, the first major international crisis of the post-Cold War era, was a constitutive moment for international law. The Article examines the contests in the United Nations over the meaning of the Crisis and shows that these contests were also over the meaning of cooperation under international law in the “new world order.” The Article casts the Gulf Crisis itself as a moment of “worldmaking,” in which the United States refashioned foundational concepts like interdependence, sovereignty, and humanity in warfare and deployed them to suit a state-centered vision of international cooperation under hierarchy.

The 1918 Soviet default is the longest and most complex sovereign debt dispute in history. The first settlement with a major Western power came with the United Kingdom in 1986. It followed a settlement almost twenty years earlier for claims arising from the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states. We show how the two negotiations became intertwined and prompted both states to take pragmatic positions on international law. Whereas the Soviet Union showed little interest in legally justifying its inconsistent positions on debt succession, the United Kingdom developed contested legal arguments on state recognition to justify using gold belonging to the Baltic States to settle Soviet claims. In addition, we document how UK government lawyers admitted internally that Britain's involvement in the Russian Civil War had been illegal, which in turn justified very limited compensation to British claimants.

Over the last three decades, international lawyers and institutions have come to understand constitution-making as an accepted technique of international law and a means of delivering peace and security. In defending this technique from its critics, scholars have drawn on a particular tradition of constitution-making that understands constitutionalism as a lawful form of international action, realizable through a set of formal practices, and juridically distinct from material concerns. This Article explores the building of this tradition through the work of legal scholars within the United States in conversation with German and Jewish émigré scholars and argues that reimagining constitutionalism for the coming decades requires rethinking this separation between the juridical and the material, as well as asking what constitutionalism demands of the laws governing the global economy.

International law prohibits states from intervening in the internal and external affairs of other states, but only if the method of intervention is coercive. This Article argues that coercion can be understood in two different ways or models. First, as coercion-as-extortion, a demand coupled with a threat of harm or the infliction of harm, done to extract some kind of concession from the victim state—in other words, an act targeting the victim state's will or decision-making calculus. Second, as coercion-as-control, an action materially depriving the victim state of its ability to control its sovereign choices. This may be done even through acts like cyber operations that the victim state is entirely unaware of. The Article argues that many of the difficulties surrounding the notion of coercion arise as a consequence of failing to distinguish between these two different models.

The “temporary golden age” of international courts is likely over. States seeking to provide oversight mechanisms and individual remedies at the international level are likely to opt for less intrusive and more flexible alternatives to adjudication. This Article analyzes the phenomenon of international complaint mechanisms through a detailed case study of the Ombudsperson to the ISIL and Al-Qaida sanctions regime. The analysis reveals an in-built tension between principle and pragmatism: the Ombudsperson's institutional design falls short of the requirements that are essential for adjudication, but it nevertheless proves to be a surprisingly effective remedy for persons wrongfully listed. The Article makes the case for the establishment of such bodies, despite some of their inherent shortcomings.

The International Law Commission (ILC) held its seventy-third session from April 18 to June 3 and from July 4 to August 5, 2022 in Geneva, under the chairmanship of Dire Tladi (South Africa). This session was the final one of the quinquennium, which originally would have occurred in the summer of 2021. (Since the Commission did not meet in the summer of 2020 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 and 2021 sessions were postponed to 2021 and 2022 respectively.) Although the pandemic continued in 2022, the members faced fewer health risks and travel difficulties; consequently, the Commission held its session with almost all members physically present in Geneva, and just a few occasionally participating online by means of Zoom.

In the 2022–2023 season, more than 104,000 tourists visited Antarctica. This represents an increase of more than 40 percent compared to the 2019–2020 pre-pandemic season. This Current Development discusses this trend and the limits of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties, which govern on the basis of consensus, in responding with regulatory action. Options for strengthening regulation in this area are also considered.

Dear Editors in Chief:

The recent uprising for racial justice marked a pivotal shift in national and global debates on race. One enduring legacy is that the language we use to speak, think, and label people is consequential. Most style guides that previously called for lowercasing Black altered their positions. This letter to the editors urges the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) to join those organizations that have also changed their policies to capitalize White.