On October 3, 2019, the United States and the United Kingdom reached a bilateral agreement to facilitate more efficient data access between the two countries for law enforcement purposes. The Agreement on Access to Electronic Data for the Purpose of Countering Serious Crime (U.S.-UK Data Access Agreement) was signed by U.S. Attorney General William Barr and UK Home Secretary Priti Patel. This is the first such agreement made by the United States after the passage of the 2018 Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, which authorizes and structures future bilateral agreements on data sharing. Pursuant to the CLOUD Act, Congress has 180 days following receipt of a notification regarding the U.S.-UK Data Access Agreement to block its entry into force via a joint resolution, which would require a majority vote in both houses of Congress and either presidential signature or a subsequent congressional override of a presidential veto.

On September 27, 2016, the Trial Chamber (Chamber) of the International Criminal Court (ICC or tribunal) rendered its judgment in Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, wherein the defendant was convicted of the war crime of intentionally directing attacks on protected cultural objects. It is the ICC's first such conviction and the first time that an accused has entered a guilty plea at the tribunal pursuant to Article 65 of the Rome Statute (Statute). Al Mahdi pled guilty to co-perpetrating attacks on protected objects pursuant to Article 8(2)(e)(iv) of the Statute for his role in the attack on, and destruction of, ten mosques and mausoleums in Timbuktu. The Trial Chamber sentenced him to nine years in prison.

As many readers are aware, Bond v. United States is a quirky case. The federal government prosecuted under the implementing legislation for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) a betrayed wife who used chemical agents to try to harm her husband’s lover. The wife argued that, as applied to her, the implementing legislation violated the Tenth Amendment. She thus raised difficult questions about the scope of the treaty power and of Congress’s authority to implement treaties through the Necessary and Proper Clause. The Bond Court avoided those questions with a clear statement rule: “we can insist on a clear indication that Congress meant to reach purely local crimes, before interpreting the statute’s expansive language in a way that intrudes on the police power of the States.” This resolution betrays the Court’s ambivalence about the appropriate limits of the treaty power and about the Court’s own capacity to define those limits.

Jacqueline Peel and Jolene Lin note that a “transnational understanding of the nature, significance and effects of climate litigation is incomplete if it fails to encompass the Global South experience.” This is especially important because the broader aim of climate litigation—namely, to provide redress to victims for climate harms—requires a collective global effort. Peel and Lin thus call for a broadening of our understanding of climate change litigation to include the experiences of the Global South. The term “Global South” has been used to refer to the collection of mostly developing countries with similar agendas that have often collaborated in environmental negotiations. These countries form a significant bloc in climate change negotiations. However, the experiences and views of many of the countries of the Global South differ in the way climate change matters are conceived and tackled. This essay demonstrates as much by examining climate change litigation in Ghana.

Recognition is a formal expression by its author about how she perceives the situation to which recognition is extended. Recognition simultaneously constitutes a means for its author to make known her own view of a situation, including the legal consequences, if any, that the author attributes to the situation, and on which the author intends to base her policy. Albeit a political act, recognition deeply affects the international legal system and carries wide-ranging legal effects in both the international and domestic legal orders, especially when it comes to the recognition of states and governments.

In their article Imperfect Alternatives: Institutional Choice and Reform of Investment Law, Sergio Puig and Gregory Shaffer develop a clear and discerning comparative framework to evaluate alternatives to the current system of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). In her essay Incremental, Systemic, and Paradigmatic Reform of Investor-State Arbitration, Anthea Roberts offers us a bracingly candid typology to describe the various actors involved in the recent efforts toward reform. My essay is meant to complement these excellent contributions and to focus unflinchingly on the tripartite role of the state itself. What I call the ISDS Trinity can be understood as shorthand for the state's systemic role as (1) law-giver, (2) protector of investment, and (3) respondent. Looking at current and future design trade-offs, I suggest that whether an institutional choice is embraced within the ISDS system has a lot to do with how well the reform validates each of these three roles. In this way, the ISDS Trinity offers further insight into how each state will approach the various trade-offs and intercamp dynamics described by Puig and Shaffer, and by Roberts, within the current debate. Put another way, the ISDS Trinity sheds additional light on whether a reform to the system will be well-received by a state and thus enjoy a greater chance of adoption.