The strangest thing about international organizations is that for all the appearance that they have of bringing about a dulling rationalization of life, they are enmeshed in global politics as deeply as any other actor, if not more deeply. The very existence of international organizations in a world order founded on the equal sovereignty of states defies fundamental logic and possibly confirms that they exist both as instruments of policy and as political agents. International organizations have a complex history of their own, and ascertaining their politics is, arguably, in the eyes of the beholder.

This chapter addresses the role of international organizations in securing financial stability. Regulating financial stability is a chief concern of capitalist economies. Like in other fields of economic law, the challenge is to strike a balance between protecting a jurisdiction against overspill risks emanating from other jurisdictions, and containing risks across jurisdictions by shifting regulation to the international level. This results in two modes of regulation, which I call sovereignty and cooperation.

The principle and practice of pro bono – volunteer legal services for poor and other marginalized groups – is an increasingly important feature of justice systems around the world. A quarter century ago, organized pro bono programs were a rarity in the United States and virtually nonexistent elsewhere. Now, in contrast, pro bono has become widely diffused and institutionally central in a growing number of countries throughout the Global North and Global South. In a sign of pro bono’s increasing international profile, PILNet (the Network for Public Interest Law), a key sponsor of the global pro bono movement, has hosted Pro Bono Forums across continents (ten in Europe and five in Asia), bringing together law firm pro bono coordinators, civil society partners, and representatives from more than fifty pro bono organizations in countries as diverse as Indonesia and Italy. In 2013, the Global Pro Bono Network was founded as a consortium of pro bono intermediaries and now includes 52 organizations in 34 countries. A 2016 survey of large-firm pro bono, covering 64,500 lawyers from 130 law firms in 75 countries, showed lawyers contributed 2.5 million pro bono hours over a 12-month period, with an annual average of 39.2 hours per lawyer. Once confined to the professional margins, pro bono now occupies a central position in the global access-to-justice movement.

Chapter 2 considers legal uncertainty in the jus ad bellum as defined in the UN Charter and other sources of law. It describes paradigms, framing this law around ‘plain cases’ of lawful and unlawful force. Supervaluationism describes paradigms as determined not by one but several tests, overlapping but not co-extensive - cases may meet all or only some tests. Fuzzy logic refutes binary distinctions between lawful and unlawful force, arguing these are end-points of a continuum, separated by a ‘penumbra of uncertainty’. The chapter outlines ‘hard cases’ of force, different to cases the UN Charter most obviously prohibits: anticipatory self-defence, pre-emptive self-defence, self-defence against non-state actors, humanitarian intervention, use of force to prevent WMD proliferation. The chapter describes how interviewees and survey participants evaluated such justifications, the results displaying the vagueness already identified. The chapter identifies one possible explanation: lawyers align with different ‘interpretive cultures’, holding different opinions about valid legal tests and interpretive techniques. ‘Restrictivists’ prefer ‘formalist’ interpretation techniques, while ‘expansionists’ prefer ‘dynamist’ interpretation techniques.

Voluntary work has always been a part of Danish lawyers’ DNA and is an integrated part of their self-understanding. However, to understand the extent and development of legal pro bono work in Denmark, which is the aim of this chapter, it is important to emphasize the duality between the restructuring of the modern universal welfare state and the marketization of legal practice. Denmark has a population of nearly 5.8 million and approximately 15,700 legal professionals. Anyone with a master’s degree in law is called a “jurist” and considered a member of the legal profession. The title qualifies for many career paths and, with further training, also grants access to monopolized positions as lawyers (or advocates), judges (magistrates, high court, and supreme court judges), and public prosecutors. Approximately one-third of all jurists work in public administration (government departments, counties, and municipalities) and one-third as lawyers or attorneys-at-law.

Energy, in the broad sense of all sources and forms of energy, fossil, renewable, electricity and fuels, is a latecomer to the field of international organization. The twin principles of permanent sovereignty of producer states over their natural energy resources and the sovereignty of consumer states over their energy mix seemed to remove this matter from the realm of international law and to allocate it to domestic law. The organizational architecture reflects this. Different from other functional systems such as health or trade, there is no single, central international organization of universal membership for the energy sector.

A tradition of pro bono publico legal work (hereafter “pro bono”) existed in England and Wales for centuries and was adopted, along with many other traditions, in the legal systems of British colonies. The questions we address here are how pro bono legal services in the jurisdiction have changed and why. In considering these questions, we are concerned with the infrastructure of provision (the architecture of pro bono), the volumes and nature of work performed (the typology of pro bono), and the causative factors underlying current patterns (the genealogy of pro bono). The answers to our research questions are relevant to understanding the significance of pro bono services. This will assist with practical issues, such as the reliability of pro bono provision in supporting access to justice, and theoretical issues, such as the significance of pro bono to legal professionalism.

The aim of this chapter is to present the state of the art of the practice of pro bono in Portugal. To accomplish this, it is necessary to start with a definition. We use pro bono to define the offer of legal services promoted by lawyers for free to individuals or organizations that cannot afford to pay for the services and do not receive state legal aid. We exclude from the definition low bono practice, that is, paying a lower fee for legal services, since it is a more complex activity with multiple causes that distinguish it from the first.

Chapter 1 outlines the main issues that the book investigates: the nature of legal and factual uncertainty in 'hard cases' engaging international law governing resort to military force, the jus ad bellum; the role of competing interpretive and strategic cultures in generating and sustaining that uncertainty, by operationalising opposing intuitions about legal interpretation, and 'extra-legal' political, strategic and ethical assessment; and the potential usefulness in dealing with these dilemmas of insights from fields outside this area of law, such as international humanitarian law, legal risk management, and strategic intelligence assessment and forecasting. The chapter describes the research methods used: structured interviews and a survey with thirty-one UK-based international lawyers, and systematic textual analysis of key International Court of Justice cases and scholarly assessments of US-led interventions in Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Finally, the chapter outlines the overall structure and argument of the book.

A week into the anti-racism protests that followed the chilling murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter (BLM), Patrisse Cullors, appeared on ABC’s Nightline. The show recapped the extraordinary events of that day: US President Donald Trump had announced that he was ‘dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers’ to quell the demonstrations. Federal police and military troops had used tear gas, rubber bullets and flash grenades on peaceful protestors gathered around the White House to clear the route to a cynical photo-op: the President posing before a church that he did not enter, holding aloft a Bible that he did not open.

A fil rouge runs from the system of conferences, the river commissions and the administrative unions of the nineteenth century through the UN, its ‘family’ and the Bretton Woods institutions established in the mid-twentieth century, up to the most recent forms of international and transnational cooperation. The issues for which these forms of cooperation have been established range from the containment of communicable diseases to the protection of intellectual property, from the preservation of historic sites to food safety and from banking supervision to internet regulation. This phenomenon, as a whole, was analyzed as ‘the legal organisation of the international society’,1 or even ‘of the world’2 at the end of the nineteenth century. Activities and patterns have further developed into what is now called global governance.3 The entities engaged are intergovernmental organizations, treaty bodies, supervisory and expert bodies, standing secretariats, civil society actors, transnational corporations and varieties of hybrid or ‘soft’ actors, all of which have some ‘legal life’ of their own.

Over the last thirty years, government funding for legal services in Australia has declined and legal need has increased. At the same time, pro bono legal work by private lawyers has increased and now plays a small but important role in the delivery of free legal help for people and communities experiencing disadvantage in Australia. Various models have developed to enable lawyers in the private profession to do this work. Some firms employ lawyers solely to undertake free work or establish in-house pro bono teams to coordinate pro bono work. Others work via pro bono “clearinghouses,” which employ their own multidisciplinary teams and match pro bono lawyers with clients. These clients may be nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that work with people and communities experiencing disadvantage, or they may be the people directly. Some firms use a blend of these approaches to pro bono.

Chapter 6 considers how insights from legal risk management, international humanitarian law, strategic intelligence analysis and forecasting might help manage uncertainty and extra-legal biases in the jus ad bellum. The chapter proposes a framework drawing on these fields, using legal and extra-legal expertise to describe the legal and factual context, competing legal theories justifying or prohibiting force, multiple possible interpretations of current facts and future consequences of using or not using force and potential risks that any legal theory is challenged or disproven, and recommending whether to accept these risks and use force, take steps to reduce risks, or not to use force where these risks are too severe. The chapter applies this framework to the Kosovo and Afghanistan interventions, showing that the framework as applied by this author recommends more cautious decisions than those actually taken. The chapter considers how such a framework might have affected UK legal advice on the 2003 Iraq intervention. The chapter concludes that the framework may help address uncertainty and extra-legal intuitions, but does not eliminate the need for judgement, and raises significant normative questions.

Global health is a very institutionalized field of governance, with diverse international institutions contributing in various ways to promote and protect human health (or negatively affecting it, depending on whom you ask). Such institutions include global international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO), regional organizations such as the European Union (EU), hybrid institutions comprising public agencies and corporate bodies such as the International Standardization Organization (ISO) and, more recently, public-private partnerships and networks showing a similar structure. This proliferation is not surprising conceptually if we consider that health is an intrinsic and essential dimension of human beings and communities, both from a biomedical point of view as well as from a public health and social perspectives. So many transnational factors, processes and policies have a direct or indirect impact on health that not only existing international organizations have integrated or upgraded health considerations in their agendas, but new ones have been established to address neglected aspects of global health governance.

The exclusion of an individual or entity from the membership of a club or body inevitably raises questions regarding the fairness of the criteria used to take the decision. It is no different when it comes to the exclusion of a state from the membership of an intergovernmental organization (IO) – either through denial of membership or suspension or expulsion from membership. The elementary reason is that membership brings with it certain benefits. These can include political recognition, the possibility of making claims on institutional resources, the opportunity to influence policies of other states in particular areas of international life and signalling and locking-in domestic policies.