These Proceedings remarks aim to address interrogations on a Global Pact for the Environment. A Global Pact for the Environment is a project for an international treaty that seeks to recognize environmental rights and duties for citizens, states, and businesses.

One of the keywords in recent space law literature is “new space activities.” Do you agree with the use of this term, and what is your understanding of it? Are we really talking about “new” activities or about a “new” space?

Thank you, Catherine, for that introduction and welcome. It is a pleasure to be here, most importantly to honor Charles Brower—who I hope and presume is out there, even if he is not immediately visible. I will have more to say about Charlie in just a moment.

My work over the last forty-five years has been at the intersection of human rights, conflict transformation, and development with the U.S. government, civil society, and the United Nations. The clearest lesson I have learned is that peaceful, prosperous, and just societies only emerge when we draw on the leadership and contributions of all of society, including women, people with disabilities, racial and religious minorities, the LGBTQ community, displaced persons, and other marginalized groups. The paradox we face is that most of the policymakers and gatekeepers who are key to ensuring this diversity and inclusion are people like me: privileged, straight, older men with little direct experience of exclusion and abuse based on identity factors.

There are many current threads in human rights research today; some are extensions of more traditional concerns, and others call upon the application of human rights law as a part of international law that is evoked by recent and changing realities. There is, first, a historical turn in international law that is relevant to human rights even though it is more traditional for legal scholarship to look at such sources. Recently, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and discoveries about the role of the women's peace movement (as women endured and challenged the mixed messages about their roles at the time of the founding of the League of Nations) are new perspectives in that they were previously set aside, as were indigenous people's perspectives. Historian Reza Afshari and others have spoken to the focus on structural transformation and lived realities as a more political methodology for human rights, going beyond discourse and its possible Western biases. Third, environmental research has emerged in a new way, using empirical data and big data to track the impact on health and human rights; included here may be the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are also new developments in the law of war, such as drone strikes, which take us toward automated war. The automation of human functions and judgments takes us, finally, to this panel's focus on human rights research: artificial intelligence, or AI. There may arise a theory of agency implicating those who create or operate AI outside a war context, or even within it as alleged war crimes.

In the European Union (EU) and Europe in general, there is currently no legally binding definition of artificial intelligence (AI) nor a common EU framework for the regulation of AI. The EU Independent High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) defines AI systems as “software (and possibly also hardware) systems designed by humans that, given a complex goal, act in the physical or digital dimension by perceiving their environment through data acquisition, interpreting the collected structured or unstructured data, reasoning on the knowledge, or processing the information, derived from this data and deciding the best action(s) to take to achieve the given goal.” The European Commission in its white paper emphasized that a definition of AI “will need to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate technical progress while being precise enough to provide the necessary legal certainty.” In particular, the terms “data” and “algorithm” need to be defined. With the exception of autonomous vehicles, there are not many AI-specific binding rules yet. A common EU legal framework, which has been proposed in the European Commission's white paper, will build trust and provide legal certainty for consumers and businesses.

The term, Artificial Intelligence (AI), has changed since it was first coined by John MacCarthy in 1956. AI, believed to have been created with Kurt Gödel's unprovable computational statements in 1931, is now called deep learning or machine learning. AI is defined as a computer machine with the ability to make predictions about the future and solve complex tasks, using algorithms. The AI algorithms are enhanced and become effective with big data capturing the present and the past while still necessarily reflecting human biases into models and equations. AI is also capable of making choices like humans, mirroring human reasoning. AI can help robots to efficiently repeat the same labor intensive procedures in factories and can analyze historic and present data efficiently through deep learning, natural language processing, and anomaly detection. Thus, AI covers a spectrum of augmented intelligence relating to prediction, autonomous intelligence relating to decision making, automated intelligence for labor robots, and assisted intelligence for data analysis.

Arnold & Porter has been honored to be able to host the annual “L” Reception for current and former members of the Legal Adviser's Office. It was a highlight for me to attend when I was the Legal Adviser. It has been a highlight to sponsor it. We, of course, invite friends of “L” like the two panelists that we have today.

The duty of good faith is well established in international law. While parties frequently invoke this duty, its scope and effect in international disputes remain unclear.

On December 13, 2018, the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, António Guterres, attended the conclusion of the Stockholm Agreement. The agreement was comprised of three subsidiary arrangements: the Hodeida Agreement; the Prisoner's Deal; and the half-page Taiz Understanding. The Hodeida Agreement, which was backed by UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions 2451 (2018) and 2452 (2019), contained several issues with a three-week timeline, including: (1) an immediate ceasefire; (2) redeployment, not withdrawal, of forces; (3) the formation of a UN-led Redeployment Coordination Committee (RCC); (4) removal of fortifications and halt of military reinforcements; (5) demining of Hodeida ports, not the city; (6) a strengthened UN presence; (7) and security and economic measures.

International law (IL) and political philosophy represent two rich disciplines for exploring issues of global justice. At their core, each seeks to build a better world based on some universally agreed norms, rules, and practices, backed by effective institutions. International lawyers, even the most positivist of them, have some underlying assumptions about a just world order that predisposes their interpretive methods; legal scholars have incorporated concepts of justice in their work even as their overall pragmatic orientation has limited the nature of their inquiries. Many philosophers, for their part, have engaged with IL to some extent—at a minimum recognizing that legal rules may need to be the vehicles for their own theories of justice, or going a step further to appraise them for their underlying moral content.

Good afternoon, and welcome to this panel. My name is Pablo Arrocha. I am the Legal Adviser of the Mexican Mission to the United Nations, and I am thrilled to be moderating a very exciting conversation in this year's ASIL conference which, as we all know, is happening under these new circumstances that are becoming our new normality and our new reality. It is a pity that we are not able to be all together in the same room, but it is very fortunate that we can at least do this virtually.

This session explored the compatibility of some of the world's most prominent international organizations and legal regimes with three Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): SDG 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls); SDG 10 (Reduce inequality within and among countries); and SDG 16 (Promote peaceful and inclusive societies, access to justice, and accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels). Panelists reflected on whether international legal rules and organizations addressed or hindered these goals across three dimensions.

In his book titled The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi analyzed the social and political upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market economy. The period referred by Karl Polanyi has long passed, but the global economic development is standing at a historical crossroad once again, in the era of globalization and free trade. Profound changes in international trade and investment governance have taken place in recent years. Among these changes, the crisis of the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the center is outstanding and significant.

China's 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the 2016 election of Donald Trump have converged to form an existential threat to the WTO. Can the WTO manage a large economy with China's level of state economic intervention and political authoritarianism? Will the Trump administration's confrontational approach reform or destroy the organization?

Eunkyung Kim Shin, a Senior Associate at the law firm of Baker McKenzie, addressed key industry trends in response to the U.S./China trade war from a private practitioner's point of view, including:

I would like to thank the American Society of International Law for asking me to convene the Fifth Annual Detlev F. Vagts Roundtable on Transnational Law. When I was chosen back in 2019, I was very pleased to learn that the Society and the Vagts family were interested in hearing about international intellectual property law. As it has turned out, that choice was prescient. Given the current pressure to find and rapidly distribute treatments and vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, intellectual property rights have become a major focus of international concern. On the one hand, these rights encourage innovation. However exclusivity can also raise costs and pose obstacles to widespread distribution of the fruits of technological progress.

Good afternoon—and in some cases, good evening. I am very grateful to the American Society of International Law, the Vagts family, our convener, Professor Rochelle Dreyfuss, and the panelists on this roundtable for the opportunity to reflect on the interplay between our international and global intellectual property (IP) regime and the determinants of health, which I discuss in a piece scheduled to be published by the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law in early 2021.

Thanks to Professor Dreyfuss for this invitation and to Professor Rutschman for her thought-provoking paper. Professor Rutschman is deeply engaged with the law of pharmaceutical innovation. And she is also deeply committed to a public health perspective. For many reasons, the two domains often speak past each other. Her paper provides a basis for shared vocabulary if not a common language.

Thanks to Rochelle and the organizers for inviting me to join this distinguished panel. And, of course, to Ana for a very nice and thought provoking paper. I have two major questions for Ana: the first is empirical and the second about framing.