Hello, I am very grateful, indeed, to the American Society of International Law for honoring me with the invitation to speak to you today. These are obviously very unusual circumstances. I am speaking to you from my wife's study in the Upper West Side of New York. Fortunately, my kids are at school at the moment, but COVID-19 has turned all of our worlds upside-down, and I hope that in the next twenty minutes or so, I can reach you, albeit not in a physical form but in a virtual one.

It is now my pleasure to introduce a very special roundtable that brings together four of my distinguished predecessors as president of the Society. Taken together, their terms of office span the last twenty-five years. Edith Brown Weiss is University Professor and former Francis Cabell Brown Professor of International Law at Georgetown Law. José Alvarez is the Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law at New York University School of Law. Lucinda A. Low is a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, where she heads the Compliance, Investigations, Trade, and Enforcement Department, and Sean D. Murphy is the Manatt/Ahn Professor of International Law at George Washington University Law School and a member of the UN International Law Commission. Welcome, welcome.

Good morning, afternoon, or evening to all and welcome to this session of ASIL's Annual Meeting on “Judging the Climate Crisis: the Role of the International Court of Justice in Addressing Environmental Harms,” which is held online this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Goodwin-Gill recalled that there are in fact at least three anniversaries this year—seventy years in the case of the Refugee Convention and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and one hundred years since Fridtjof Nansen was appointed as the League's first High Commissioner for Refugees.

Good morning. My name is Justin Hansford. I am the Executive Director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University School of Law, and I would like to welcome everybody to the Protest and Police Force panel on examining racial discrimination and the legality of police force in the United States here this morning.

This panel touched upon the challenges that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic brought to the international legal profession and explored opportunities for new professionals. The focus lay on practical suggestions for topics to look out for in the near future.

Better understanding of the Geneva Conventions increases compliance with the norms of international humanitarian law. The commentaries are one tool for gaining that understanding.

The question of where to begin when considering the conditions under which states and non-state actors comply with international humanitarian law (IHL) is itself an interesting one because of the history of IHL. IHL was created by states, principally to govern their behavior in relation to each other. The major codified elements of IHL, such as the 1949 Geneva Conventions, are agreements signed by states. For the last several decades, however, most wars have occurred within, rather than between, states. This trend raises the question of whether and when armed non-state actors (ANSAs, typically called “rebel groups” by political scientists) might comply with IHL.

Widespread violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) in today's armed conflicts continues to be a critical challenge for the international community. Many actors such as United Nations agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engage with parties to conflict to promote their compliance with IHL. In this intervention, I will focus on the positive role that non-traditional actors, such as non-state armed groups (NSAGs) and their constituencies, may play in this regard. My argument draws mainly from my experience with Geneva Call, a humanitarian NGO that has been engaging NSAGs toward IHL compliance over the past twenty years.

Welcome everyone to the 2021 Hudson Medal Presentation. The Manley O. Hudson Medal, the Society's highest honor, has been awarded since 1959 to a distinguished person of American or other nationality for outstanding contributions to scholarship and achievement in international law. The medal has been conferred on many luminaries, including Rosalyn Higgins, Tom Franck, Michael Reisman, Eli Lauterpacht, John Jackson, Bruno Simma, Peter Trooboff, and Stephen Breyer.

For a second year in a row, the American Society of International Law had to convene an all virtual annual meeting because the COVID-19 pandemic made international travel and gathering in cavernous ballrooms impossible. I had the pleasure of chairing a pre-recorded panel on the rise of restrictions on data flows and digital technologies, which featured a stellar cast of experts distributed across three continents and time zones. This panel depended on the digital infrastructure provided by a private videoconferencing company on top of the public infrastructure of interconnectivity that the internet has supplied for more than three decades. As the pandemic forced people around the world into lockdowns—albeit asynchronously and unevenly—it further mainstreamed the use of communications platforms for everyday interactions, whether public or private, whether for business or leisure.

As a scholar of the politics of the nexus of national security and investment policy, I can best add to the discussion on the issue of data and digital tech restrictions mostly from a foreign investment regulation and investment screening vantage point.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Annual Meeting for the American Society of International Law. Our panel today is on “Accomplice Accountability for Grave Violations of International Law.” We have an amazing group with us to talk about these issues.

Investment treaties, as we know, grant foreign investors certain substantive rights as well as direct remedies for enforcement, in particular access to international arbitration. Yet these rights and remedies are not granted to an investor in a vacuum. They often exist alongside rights under domestic law and contractual regimes. Moreover, when a foreign investment is made through a multilevel corporate structure—as is common—various entities in the chain may have rights under different investment treaties.

Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. My name is Gian Luca Burci. I am an adjunct professor of international law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and in my former professional life, a lawyer in the United Nations system for almost thirty years, including ten years as legal counsel for the World Health Organization (WHO).

Thank you so much for having me in this conversation with the recipient of the Goler T. Butcher Medal for this year.

Some international crises are circumscribed, others are more diffuse, sometimes of varying intensity depending on the region. But, at the end of the day, all regions might be impacted according to an uncertain timetable. This is the case, for example, with terrorism, cybersecurity, the migration crisis, and the climate crisis, which is one aspect of environmental damage that intersects with the health crisis. Some are latent and marked by sudden outbreaks, such as terrorism or the Islamic State's criminal operations. Others are set to worsen, such as the migration crisis, which today is probably small compared to what it will become. We must also think about financial or economic crises, cybersecurity breaches, misuse of new technologies and social networks, and, importantly, the painful experience of the January 2021 democratic crisis in the United States. But the current COVID-19 health crisis is the crisis that occupies everyone's mind today.

Through the lens of current crises—including the climate crisis, the crisis of democracy, and of course the COVID-19 pandemic—Professor Daudet examines the role that international law plays in mediating the principle of national sovereignty and the interests of the global community. He goes on to inquire whether these crises might in some way create an opportunity to advance the international legal and political order.