The present issue of the Journal contains two enlightening articles dealing with the question of the abolition of extraterritoriality in China,1 written respectively from the American and the Chinese viewpoint.

The inauguration of the mixed court of tangier on june 1, 1925, marked the beginning of a new experiment in international cooperation for the administration of justice. While it is perhaps too early for any definite conclusions to be drawn as to the success and significance of this experiment, enough time may have elapsed for some useful study to be made of it and possibly for some forecast of its future.

In response to the 1991 Supreme Court decision resuscitating the presumption against extraterritoriality [hereinafter “PAE” or “presumption”], EEOC v. Arabian American Oil Co. (Aramco), Larry Kramer described the presumption as an anachronism—a throwback to the strict territorialist approach to choice of law that prevailed before the mid-Twentieth Century but has been mostly abandoned since then. The title of his scathing article, Vestiges of Beale, referred to Joseph Beale, the Harvard Law professor and reporter of the First Restatement of Conflict of Laws, whose since-discredited theories underlay that Restatement’s approach to choice of law. In the cases since Aramco, the Court has strengthened and expanded the presumption. With its decision in RJR Nabisco v. European Community, it is fair to say, the Court has out-Beale’d Beale.

Economic sanctions have been the West's response of choice to Russia's full-scale aggression in Ukraine. Predictably, speculation abounds as to what these sanctions portend for future responses to acts of interstate aggression. The principles underpinning the “trading with the enemy” laws of a seemingly bygone era have resurfaced but applied not to the sanctioning powers’ own enemies but in solidarity with another state, at least insofar as the breaches of erga omnes obligations through armed aggression are concerned. The contemporary expansion in sanctions practice may have far-reaching repercussions.

Fleur Johns' thesis about the increasing role of data in the verification of the condition of the world and how this impacts on international law is stimulating and bears reflection. This is an extremely interesting and innovative approach to the issue of data and its role in state engagement with mass migration. From the perspective of a scholar on international refugee law, a number of issues arise as a result of the analysis. One of the contested aspects of mass migration and refugee protection is the inherent inconsistency between two ways of thinking about human rights—the first is the duty of (some) international organizations to protect human rights in a manner which elides human rights and humanitarian law, and the second is the right of the individual to dignity, the basis of all human rights according to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1949. The first enhances the claims of states to sovereign right to control their borders (mediated through some international organizations), while the second recognizes the international human rights duties of states and international organizations to respect the dignity of people as individuals (including refugees). Fleur is completely correct that human rights abuses are at the core of refugee movements. While there are always many people in a country who will stay and fight human rights abuses even when this results in their sacrifice, others will flee danger trying to get themselves and their families to places of safety; we are not all heroes. Yet, when people flee in more than very small numbers, state authorities have a tendency to begin the language of mass migration. The right to be a refugee becomes buried under the threat of mass migration to the detriment of international obligations. Insofar as mass migration is a matter for management, the right of a refugee is an individual right to international protection which states have bound themselves to offer.

On December 1, 2018, Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecom manufacturer Huawei, in Vancouver as she was going from Hong Kong to Mexico. Meng, who has been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with crimes relating to violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran, is currently awaiting an extradition hearing in Canada. Her arrest has complicated efforts to reach a resolution to the ongoing U.S-China trade dispute while straining relations between China and Canada, which is seeking the release of several Canadians detained by China in apparent retaliation for Meng's arrest.

In the last century, international law expanded to new domains that had traditionally fallen under exclusive governmental authority—such as human rights, environmental law, nonproliferation law, trade law, etc. This expansion of international rules coalesced into transnational legal fields, which not only include norms, rules, and procedures, but also monitoring systems designed to ensure compliance by member states and private actors. By assuming that all levels of a legal regime (from norms to rules and procedures, and then to monitoring systems and sanctioning mechanisms in case of observed violations) function in a harmonious and complementary way—as the apparatus of international law is supposed to—, some international law scholars may be tempted to avoid spending time analyzing the technical operations of monitoring agencies. The perusal of inspection and compliance manuals is less rewarding and more taxing than the analysis of preambles of treaties and conventions, where norms of good conduct, allocation of rights, and formal authority between institutions are usually delineated.

The Marxist tradition is a crucial voice in the global anti-racist movement. Marxists were at the forefront of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements, with those movements taking up Marxist concepts and deploying them to understand capitalism, race, and colonialism. Yet, these Marxist voices did not reflect systematically on international law. This essay attempts to remedy this neglect and understand what anti-racist and Third Worldist Marxists can offer international legal thought. It begins with a discussion of the typical (liberal) approach to racism in international law. It then explores how Marxists have understood the relationship between racism and capitalism, arguing that this fundamentally impacts upon international law. The essay concludes with an exploration of how these dynamics have played out in international law.

This essay considers the ideological context of blockchain technology. This technology is often celebrated for its potential for decentralization, distribution, privacy, and a lack of intermediaries and coordinators for transactions and general governance. Because of these features, blockchain technology, and, in particular, its most famous inauguration—the bitcoin blockchain—is frequently identified with libertarianism. In this essay, we argue that the ideological context of blockchain technology is much more complicated. In addition to unraveling a number of background ideologies and their role in this technology, we raise the ontological issue concerning the relationship of ideology to technology. These matters have implications for, among other things, the approach that should be taken to blockchain's governance, as well as how international lawyers may approach this “foreign”-seeming phenomenon that has its proponents from the European Central Bank to the United Nations (not, however, forgetting the private sector nor the digital underground).

In Khlaifia and Others v. Italy, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (Grand Chamber or Court) released a landmark opinion with broad implications for how states must respect the individual rights of migrants. In the judgment, issued on December 15, 2016, the Court held that Italy's treatment of migrants after the Arab Spring violated the requirement of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) that migrants receive procedural guarantees that enable them to challenge their detention and expulsion. The Court also held that Italy's treatment of migrants in detention centers did not violate the ECHR's prohibition on cruel and inhuman treatment, in part due to the emergency circumstances involved. The Court further held that Italy's return of migrants to Tunisia did not violate the prohibition on collective expulsion in Article 4 of Protocol 4 of the ECHR. Enforcement of the judgment would require many European states to provide a clear basis in domestic law for the detention of migrants and asylum-seekers. Given the global diffusion of state practices involving migrants, and other states’ desires to restrict migration, this case has broad implications for delineating the obligations of states to migrants and the rights of migrants within receiving countries.