The recent Covid-19 global health crisis not only brings into sharp relief the current problems afflicting the international intellectual property regime (IIPR) but also calls into question its legitimacy as an international authority. Against this backdrop, the article aims to launch an investigation into the legitimacy of the IIPR, as an international co-ordinative authority, designed to protect IP rights without prejudice to international trade norms. Drawing on Raz’s service conception of authority, it explores whether the IIPR lives up to its promises by enabling co-ordination between states over IP rights without undermining the initial balance on which it is founded, struck between developing and developed countries, as well as between international protection of IP- cum-trade rights and domestic regulatory autonomy. It does so by classifying the historical evolution of the IIPR under three different phases: (i) its foundation, (ii) before, and (iii) after the TRIPS-plus. Upon showing the legitimacy challenges inherent in its undemocratic foundation, the article points to the success of the regime in finding a balance between conflicting interests before the TRIPS-plus era. Later, it underlines the many challenges that come with linking the IIPR to the investment regime and argues that the FTAs and frequent regime-shifting activities put further pressure on the authority and legitimacy of the regime. Stressing the importance of democratic participation for the legitimacy of any co-ordinative authority, the article casts doubt on the IIPR’s legitimacy and concludes by raising some points to overcome the ongoing legitimacy challenges.

Quite a few recent ECJ judgments touch on various elements of territorial rule. Thereby, they raise the profile of the main question this Article asks: Which territorial claims does the EU make? To provide an answer, the present Article discusses and categorizes the individual elements of territoriality in the EU’s architecture. The influence of EU law on national territorial rule on the one hand and the emergence of territorial governance elements at the European level on the other provide the main pillars of the inquiry. Once combined, these features not only help to improve our understanding of the EU’s distinctly supranational conception of territoriality. What is more, the discussion raises several important legitimacy questions. As a consequence, the Article calls for the development of a theoretical model to evaluate and justify territoriality in a political community beyond the state.

Threats of armed force are frequently employed in international affairs, yet they have received little ethical scrutiny in their own right. This article addresses that deficit by examining how threats, taken as a speech act, require a moral assessment that is distinctive vis-à-vis the actual use of armed force. This is done first by classifying threats within the framework of speech act theory. Then, applying standard just war criteria, we analyze conditional threats of harm under Thomas Schelling's twofold distinction of compellence and deterrence. We aim to show how threats of armed attack, while subject to many of the same evaluative principles as the corresponding use of force, nevertheless have distinctive characteristics of their own. These are outlined under the headings of just cause, ad bellum proportionality, legitimate authority, and right intention. The overall aim is to explain how threats in the international sphere represent a special category that warrants a just war analysis.

Judges are increasingly asked to decide whether a rule of national law is applicable to a cyberspace actor who is not present in their jurisdiction, or whose activities do not clearly fall within the established understanding of the rule. They do this through interpreting the applicability and meaning of the law.

Every attempt to enforce a national law makes a claim that the law has authority over the cyberspace actor. By accepting that claim, the judge asserts that the law's claim is legitimate. This is a Hartian exercise, adopting the internal view of the national legal system as the test for legitimacy.

But in cyberspace the legitimacy of a national law claim is determined not by the internal perspective of the legal system but by the external perspective of cyberspace actors. A law will only have authority in cyberspace if it can convince cyberspace actors that its claim is legitimate. And a legal system which repeatedly makes illegitimate claims thereby weakens its status as a system which adheres to the rule of law.

Judges can help solve this problem by interpreting laws and applying public and private international law so as to reject applicability claims which are illegitimate. To do this successfully, they need to understand the jurisprudential foundations of any law's authority in cyberspace.

In judicial review of administrative action, the pivotal distinction between decisions about “jurisdiction” (for the reviewing court) and “the merits of the case” (for the administrative decision maker) is a source of much confusion. This article argues that jurisdiction should be understood as the scope of legitimate authority, the best theory of which is Joseph Raz's service conception of authority. As well as explaining how to determine jurisdiction, this article explains that a legitimate authority's intra-vires decision “pre-empts” the reviewing court's judgment on the merits, and that the concept of jurisdiction precludes any standard of reasonableness for reviewing a legitimate authority.

What does authority mean under international law? There are various actors with different forms of authority, but no overarching concept of what characteristic endows an actor with authority, and even less of a coherent conception of legitimacy as a requirement for such authority. In fact, international law recognizes different authorities for different causes and different contexts, allocated to different actors, who base their authority on different characteristics (state legitimacy, representativity, military power, control). After disaggregating the concept of authority and outlining some of the consequences that follow from each type, this article highlights a number of different actors and describes the various authorities each has under international law. For instance, under jus in bello, nonstate actors can create a state of armed conflict in which they can often continue to use military means without legal sanction. While jus ad bellum may still in principle require legitimacy (in the formal sense of being a state), current jus in bello covers a range of non-state actors. Thus, from a practical point of view, the jus in bello regulations undermine any jus ad bellum requirement of legitimate authority.

Despite a recent explosion of interest in the ethics of armed conflict, the traditional just war criterion that war be waged by a “legitimate authority” has received relatively little attention. Moreover, of those theorists who have addressed the criterion, many are deeply skeptical about its moral significance. This article aims to add some clarity and precision to the authority criterion and the debates surrounding it, and to suggest that this skepticism may be too quick. The first section analyzes the authority criterion and reveals that there are at least two distinct moral claims associated with it, each requiring separate evaluation. The second section outlines an increasingly influential “reductivist” approach to just war theory, explaining how this approach grounds powerful objections to the authority criterion. The third section sketches the most promising strategies for providing a qualified defense of authority, while acknowledging the further questions and complications these strategies raise. Importantly, the article aims to rehabilitate the authority criterion from within a broadly reductivist view.

From an international political theory perspective, this paper assesses the justifiability of ascribing human rights obligations, in the form of international or extraterritorial law, onto transnational corporations (TNCs). The major policy prescriptions in favour of extending human rights duties to include TNCs become deeply problematic when considered in light of advocates’ claims that human rights rules, rather than a sovereign’s legal rules, are necessarily the rules that are truly authoritative and/or in line with a ‘global rule of law’. This paper discusses concepts such as authority, human rights and the rule of law, and juxtaposes these concepts: firstly, with one another; secondly, with the legal status quo about jurisdiction over companies; and thirdly, with corporations’ de facto transnationality in the contemporary international system. This paper discusses key similarities and differences between companies, states, and individuals, and highlights the relevance of these distinctions to those agents’ potential human rights duties. This paper concludes by arguing that the ‘TNC and human rights’ project is well worth pursuing, but according to different theoretical foundations than those currently endorsed by legal and policy analysts, and it suggests important directions for future research.