The conclusion draws broader conclusions and implications for international relations theory. The identification of different logics among competing norm circles suggests that linear models of convergence are unlikely to hold. This has implications for regionalism that was expected to grow stronger, with nation-state sovereignties receding in importance – under one logic that would be the case, but under multiple logics there was no inevitability about it. Finally the manner of a norm circle’s ‘victory’ in a regional domain has implications for legitimacy and further contestation. The chapter ends with policy implications from the study.

In the preceding chapters, we had the opportunity to examine in detail Huber’s conflicts treatment and to draw connections to Huber’s overall doctrinal outlook. In the process, we have come across common perceptions, or rather misperceptions, of Huber in conflicts literature. Having established the context, we have been gradually moving towards issues more specific to a doctrinal work in the conflict of laws. Our exercise is completed in this chapter, where Huber’s doctrine is examined in the light of the basic conceptual oppositions of the conflicts discourse. Huber has been often described as a territorialist and as a unilateralist. He has also been perceived as thinking of the conflict of laws in terms of addressing or seeking to avoid a conflict between the “sovereignties” of different states. His famous three axioms are a recurring invocation in all these perceptions, as indeed is the concept of comity, with the origins of which Huber has become associated as none in classical and modern consciousness.

In the long march of mankind from the cave to the computer a central role has always been played by the idea of law – the idea that order is necessary and chaos inimical to a just and stable existence. Every society, whether it be large or small, powerful or weak, has created for itself a framework of principles within which to develop. What can be done, what cannot be done, permissible acts, forbidden acts, have all been spelt out within the consciousness of that community. Progress, with its inexplicable leaps and bounds, has always been based upon the group as men and women combine to pursue commonly accepted goals, whether these be hunting animals, growing food or simply making money.

That multilateralism is at risk has become a truism underlying global politics and, more specifically, the international regulation of trade. Besides the ongoing escalation of measures impeding international trade between trading nations, a decisive and well-recognized risk to economic multilateralism as we know it also stems from the growing emergence of plurilateral regulation formats. Governments are seeking to deepen international regulation in areas where they find common interests – and such progress has proven to be very difficult to achieve in large negotiation formats after the successful conclusion of the WTO Uruguay Round. The most disputed issues fall in an area of international trade law, which is directly concerned with state sovereignty and disciplines on – in the language of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) – domestic regulation. The rules that are decided and implemented in jurisdictions that regulate economic activities are highly normative political decisions and notoriously tricky to assess with regards to their impact on cross-border commercial exchanges.

In almost every textbook on private international law, there is a reference to the Medieval and Early Modern jurists who, it is claimed, wrote on the conflict of laws. Such references are often very brief. Some appear to unveil the foundation stone of our whole doctrinal edifice, but many others may look and feel ornamental, of no importance to their author’s argument. What matters most is that, when viewed as a whole, these references constitute an integral aspect of our thinking about private international law – an aspect that, it will be argued in this book, is important, if neglected and often misunderstood.

Recent years have seen an appreciable growth in the level of understanding of the dangers facing the international environment and an extensive range of environmental problems is now the subject of serious international concern. These include atmospheric pollution, marine pollution, global warming and ozone depletion, the dangers of nuclear and other extra-hazardous substances and threatened wildlife species. Such problems have an international dimension in two obvious respects. First, pollution generated from within a particular state often has a serious impact upon other countries. The prime example would be acid rain, whereby chemicals emitted from factories rise in the atmosphere and react with water and sunlight to form acids. These are carried in the wind and fall eventually to earth in the rain, often thousands of miles away from the initial polluting event. Secondly, it is now apparent that environmental problems cannot be resolved by states acting individually. Accordingly, cooperation between the polluting and the polluted state is necessitated. However, the issue becomes more complicated in those cases where it is quite impossible to determine from which country a particular form of environmental pollution has emanated. This would be the case, for example, with ozone depletion. In other words, the international nature of pollution, both with regard to its creation and the damage caused, is now accepted as requiring an international response.

Huber’s treatment of conflict issues forms, in both its versions, part of comprehensive – and systematic – doctrinal works. It must therefore be placed in that context.of this chapter examines the legal style of Huber’s conflicts treatment: the choices he made as to structure and the organization of his argument, on the one hand, and as to the use of authorities, on the other.addresses the organization of the legal subject matter within our text.examines the use of the form/substance distinction, and their corollaries. , , andaddress respectively the role of jurisdiction, party autonomy, and decisional harmony in Huber’s choice-of-law system.

Given what we now know and understand about the complexity of human choice, it is time for international law as a field and as a community of people to embrace the beautiful and messy reality of being human. This chapter calls for a cultural shift in international law and examines some of the advantages and anxieties of such a shift.

Let us return for a moment to the story I shared in the opening chapter, of that candlelit dinner table and the conversation I had with the ICJ judge Z. Recall that we were speaking of a case that the ICJ had taken up concerning an allegation made in 1999 by the Democratic Republic of the Congo that Rwanda had engaged in genocide along the border, highlighted by the fact that Rwanda itself had suffered gravely from genocidal acts less than a decade earlier. Despite the courteous and elegant nature of the dinner, our conversation had turned tense. We both understood the legal basis for the court’s determination that it did not have jurisdiction in this case: Rwanda had consented to the ICJ’s jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes when it had ratified the Genocide Convention.

Over time, the Scandinavian countries have earned a certain reputation for being “global good Samaritans” (Brysk 2009; Vik et al. 2018). According to a widespread narrative, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden have an exceptional approach to world affairs, which revolves around the pursuit of peace, human rights, sustainable development, and a humanitarian commitment to “saving lives.” Scandinavian countries are indeed the world’s most generous nations in terms of official development aid allocation – the only ones consistently at or above the target set by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Their largesse is cast as uniquely motivated and driven by altruistic and idealist motives, contrasting with the self-interested foreign policies of the great powers (Ingebritsen 2002; Lancaster 2007). This reputation is not exclusive, however, to outsiders who read Scandinavia as a utopian promise of a less cynical world order. It is also a key component of the Scandinavians’ own national identity and collective self-image. Scandinavian citizens are inclined to identify their countries’ foreign policies with values of solidarity and generosity (see Leira 2007).

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), established in 1945, is one of the most powerful institutions in the world. As the judicial arm of the United Nations, it interprets and shapes international law by adjudicating disputes between nations and providing advisory opinions. Over the years, the court has settled numerous disputes over territory, boundaries, and treaty obligations and has provided advisory rulings on the biggest questions in international law. In every case, the court’s judgment is the result of choices made by the fifteen women and men serving on the court at that time. They hold the highest legal credentials and are carefully vetted and elected by both the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council. Collectively, these judges have the power to make decisions that bind nations. Their rulings may be enforced by the UN Security Council. In the international legal profession, there is no higher office.

This is an elaborate narrative, whose normative implications – soliciting Huber as an authority for a more vigorous pursuit of public policy – will be discussed further below.2 For the time being, it suffices to note that such allusions may tell us more about the modern preoccupations of their authors, than about Huber himself, his world, and his politics – or about how he perceived and exploited the various groups or bodies of norms (Roman law, provincial statutes, ius gentium) constituting the law of his jurisdiction.

The role of the state in the modern world is a complex one. According to legal theory, each state is sovereign and equal. In reality, with the phenomenal growth in communications and consciousness, and with the constant pressure and fluidity of global rivalries, not even the most powerful of states can be entirely sovereign and independent. Interdependence and the close-knit character of contemporary international commercial and political society ensures that virtually any action of a state could well have profound repercussions upon the system as a whole and the decisions under consideration by other states. This has led to an increasing interpenetration of international law and domestic law across a number of fields, such as human rights, environmental and international investment law, where at the least the same topic is subject to regulation at both the domestic and the international levels (and indeed the regional level in the case of the European Union and others). With the rise and extension of international law, questions begin to arise paralleling the role played by the state within the international system and concerned with the relationship between the internal legal order of a particular country and the rules and principles governing the international community as a whole. Municipal law governs the domestic aspects of government and deals with issues between individuals, and between individuals and the administrative apparatus, while international law focuses primarily upon the relations between states. That is now, however, an overly simplistic assertion. There are many instances where problems can emerge and lead to difficulties between the two systems. In a case before a municipal court a rule of international law may be brought forward as a defence to a charge, as for example in R v. Jones, where the defence of seeking to prevent a greater crime (essentially of international law) was claimed with regard to the alleged offence of criminal damage (in English law), or where a vessel is being prosecuted for being in what, in domestic law, is regarded as territorial waters, but in international law would be treated as part of the high seas. Further, there are cases where the same situation comes before both national and international courts, which may refer to each other’s decisions in a complex process of interaction. For example, the failure of the United States to allow imprisoned foreign nationals access to consular assistance in violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations 1963 was the subject of case-law before the International Court of Justice, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and US courts, while there is a growing tendency for domestic courts to be used to address violations of international law.

The ascertainment of the sources of international law lies at the heart of the system. The discovery of the law on any given point in domestic legal orders is not usually too difficult a process. In the English legal system, for example, one looks to see whether the matter is covered by an Act of Parliament (or possibly a statutory instrument) and, if it is, the law reports are consulted as to how it has been interpreted by the courts. If the particular point is not specifically referred to in a statute, court cases will be examined to elicit the required information. In other words, there is a definite method of discovering what the law is. In addition to verifying the contents of the rules, this method also demonstrates how the law is created, namely, by parliamentary legislation or judicial case-law. This gives a degree of certainty to the legal process because one is able to tell when a proposition has become law and the necessary mechanism to resolve any disputes about the law is evident. It reflects the hierarchical character of a national legal order with its gradations of authority imparting to the law a large measure of stability and predictability.

On October 10, 2019, the UN Security Council met in an emergency closed-door session at UN headquarters in New York City. One day prior to that, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had ordered a ground invasion into northeastern Syria, claiming that Kurdish fighters, instrumental US allies in the fight against the Islamic State, posed a terrorism threat to Turkey. Days earlier, President Donald Trump, acting against the advice of his top military leaders, had ordered US troops out of the region, clearing the way for Turkey’s invasion. In spite of the illegal nature of Turkey’s actions, the council did not reach an agreement to condemn Turkey’s use of force in Syria and its Kurdish-controlled northern border region. Russia and the United States allegedly had blocked the resolution

The genesis of the AU derives from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s proposal to reform the OAU as the ‘United States of Africa’. While he was rhetorically credited with the creation of the AU, the new AU looked nothing like what he had proposed and he was continually frustrated in attempts to move it to the federal structure he desired. This chapter examines the critical period of debate during the formation of the AU and how the ‘US of Africa’ was sidelined or rebuffed as both norm circles wrested with each other for control of the initiative, appeals to shared norms, and other opportunities to influence each other.