This article examines COVAX, a public private partnership, from a public law perspective. It asks whether COVAX is a legitimate and appropriate instrument with regard to the goal of distributing COVID-19 vaccines in a globally equitable manner and enabling equal access to vaccination worldwide. By developing public-legal legitimacy standards for this purpose, the article critically distances itself from the outset from considering the use of private actors and forms of action in public functions (‘privatization’) essentially as a release of market economy rationality, which enables efficiency and effectiveness gains and relieves the public sector. With the public law perspective, the article questions precisely whether private-law, market-based action is appropriate with respect to the global distribution of vaccines in the pandemic.

This article examines the limits that academics from peripheral countries might encounter while trying to influence the decision-making process inside an international organization. Although there are different mechanisms whereby academia might influence non-academic debates, we highlight here the use of policy papers, in order to examine and discuss the non-textual barriers which might be faced by those academics. After an analysis of primary sources this article presents some pragmatic limits in the use of policy papers and discusses the consequences of this condition for the legitimation of international organizations. As such, relevant international organizations still seem to be unresponsive to some initiatives in particular: closed to the spontaneous participation of academia; and not willing to call for contributions from academic communities. This is particularly relevant for contributions from peripheral academia and other non-state actors, who lack the capability to disturb the traditional ideational power exercised by core (Western) countries and by state-centric ideology in current international law.

This contribution presents international judicial institutions as multifunctional actors against the background of a traditional understanding, which sees just one function: settling disputes. The traditional, one-dimensional understanding eclipses other important functions that many international courts do actually perform in contexts of global governance and it underrates problems in their legitimation. In order to appreciate international adjudications’ manifold contributions to social interaction, the paper first identifies three more functions beyond dispute settlement: the stabilization of normative expectations, law-making, and the control as well as legitimation of authority exercised by others. It then places these functions within broader basic understandings of international courts, which respectively picture them as instruments of the parties in a state-centred world order, as organs of a value-based international community, and as institutions of specific legal regimes. The distinct problems that each of these basic understanding faces lead to the contours of a new paradigm for the study of international courts as actors exercising public authority. The present functional analysis ultimately helps to refine both the phenomenon and normative questions.

Teck v. Pakootas revisits the infamous Trail smelter, which made history in public international law. This more recent case should be set to make history as well, due to the manner in which the issue of extraterritorial exercise of jurisdiction was handled. The substantive result reached in the courts seems fair, reasonable, and appropriate: a notorious polluter, Teck Cominco Metals Inc., is called to account by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and required to study the feasibility of cleaning up a site it contaminated by dumping effluents in a transboundary river over the course of several decades. Yet, both courts that examined this case on the merits failed to understand the ramifications of this extension of the Environmental Protection Agency's jurisdiction across the Canada–United States border. This article begins with a doctrinal analysis of jurisdictional rules in private and public international law, and then proceeds to evaluate those rules with the help of insights from scholarship on global administrative law and international public authority.