Human rights offer to ground global health law in equity and justice. Human rights norms, advocacy, and strategies have proven successes in challenging private and public inequities and in realizing more equitable domestic and global health governance. However, mobilizing human rights within global health law faces enormous political, economic, technological, and epidemiological challenges, including from the corrosive health impacts of power, politics, and commerce. This article focuses on what human rights could bring to three major global health law challenges — health systems strengthening and universal health coverage, the commercial and economic determinants of health, and pandemic disease threats. We argue that human rights offer potentially powerful norms and strategies for achieving equity and justice in these and other key global health domains. The challenge for those working in human rights and global health law is to work nimbly, creatively, and courageously to strengthen the contribution of these instruments to health justice.

This article reviews the potential for United States accession to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) under the current U.S. leadership, the administration of President Donald J. Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress. The strategic significance of U.S. ratification of UNCLOS is demonstrated by U.S. claims and rights in areas subject to geopolitical contestation such as the Arctic and South China Sea. More broadly, the United States has a compelling interest in preserving the international order and protecting the global commons, as embodied in the terms of the treaty. Despite clear evidence that ratification is in the U.S. national interest, UNCLOS faces the obstacle of continued Senate inaction and the challenge of a domestic political atmosphere suspicious of international law and institutions. President Trump, as a Republican leader and populist dealmaker, may be well-positioned to overcome domestic political opposition and achieve a vital U.S. foreign policy objective that has eluded his White House predecessors.

In September 2022, the curtains at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia opened for the last time. Given the hundreds of millions spent, long delays, few trials, and non-stop controversies, many people wonder if the tribunal was worth the time, money, and effort. This essay describes three perspectives on the tribunals, two negative (purist and progressivist perspectives) and one more positive (the pragmatist perspective). The author then discusses why, despite the tribunal's shortcomings, he agreed to testify as an expert witness, an experience recounted in his recently published book, Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Communities of international legal discourse have been increasingly favouring tweets and blogs over traditional media of academic expression. Legal practice communities have likewise been abandoning press releases in favour of tweets and digital newsletters. For discourse communities, this trend can broaden the scope of eligible participants, while encouraging progress through contestation and legal pluralism. At the same time, it may encourage over-contentiousness, sensationalism, “celebritism”, and “click-hunting”, at the expense of genuine dialogue and problem-solving. For communities of practice, the spatial particularities of social media platforms prompt rapid exchanges and reposts with minimal prior reflection, while offering no tangible benefits compared to traditional means of law shaping. The trend, in any event, appears irreversible. We should thus shift to capitalizing on this trend’s benefits while mitigating its various side effects through an organic process of increased awareness.

This article discusses the East Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF), a regional energy organisation formed in 2020. It highlights the organisation’s significance in promoting cooperation in the East Mediterranean energy sector but notes the absence of a robust legal framework, governance structure and binding rules. The lack of mechanisms for enforcing decisions among members is also a concern. To address these shortcomings, the article proposes the adoption of a regional energy treaty.

The suggested treaty holds the potential of transforming the EMGF into a potent and legally binding energy organisation. By establishing a comprehensive legal foundation, the treaty could foster energy cooperation, promote sustainable energy initiatives, and create a secure investment environment, thereby stimulating economic growth across the Mediterranean region. Moreover, implementation of the treaty could play a crucial role in ensuring energy security within the East Mediterranean. It has the capacity to help in mediating and resolving disputes concerning maritime boundaries, transit and political issues that pose threats to the stability and effectiveness of the EMGF.

For a regional energy treaty to be effective, it should encompass provisions concerning transit, trade, investment and environmental protection. The inclusion of decision-making bodies and robust dispute settlement mechanisms is essential to encourage investment, facilitate unhindered transit and consolidate the stature of the EMGF as a pre-eminent energy organisation.

The notion of infrastructure has recently featured prominently in international legal scholarship. The ambition behind the turn to infrastructure in international legal theory is comparable to other large attempts to conceptualize the discipline. Yet, against the backdrop of work in the humanities and social sciences, theoretical engagement with infrastructure is still nascent in the legal discipline. In this Article, we build on another recent development in international legal scholarship—the turn to “materiality”—to articulate a systematic theory of infrastructure in international law. At the center of our study is the case study of the cruise ship. Studying cruise ships and their legal and political environment in detail, we introduce three conceptual building blocks through which we develop a more comprehensive theory of infrastructure: Platform, object and rupture. Although we focus on cruise ships, the theory of legal infrastructure that we offer is applicable to a wide array of industries and issues.

This Article provides the outline for a conceptual framework focusing on legal infrastructures, comprised of socio-material assemblages and entangled legal normativities that both enable and constrain human societies. Section A introduces the growing transdisciplinary field of infrastructural studies, which employs the notion of infrastructure as a tool for analyzing the constitutive relationship between society and essential material structures. It then draws out the analytical conjunction of law and infrastructure in the role ascribed to law within existing applications of infrastructural studies and the nascent engagement with infrastructural theory within the legal discipline itself. Part II develops a conceptual framework on legal infrastructures, outlining three avenues for how thinking infrastructurally may yield new perspectives on the dynamic relationship between law, social practices, and socio-technical materiality; (a) legal infrastructures as socio-material formations that generate societal effects (b) legal infrastructures as schemes of social practice that recursively entangle to produce new configurations, and (c) legal infrastructures as distributing norms across transnational and regime boundaries.

What factors explain compliance with monetary damages awarded by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR)? States comply with the payment of monetary damages at higher rates than other forms of reparation. However, the higher compliance rate belies the significant variation in time to compliance with the payment of monetary awards. We identify three case-level characteristics that explain this variation: size of awards, number of victims, and victim identity. We test our hypotheses utilizing original datasets on compliance with monetary damages and case characteristics in IACtHR judgments through 2019, and find support for all three factors on time to compliance.

The West Bank, also referred to as Judea and Samaria, has been subject to belligerent occupation since 1967, and its legal framework is grounded primarily in international law. This legal foundation of belligerent occupation emanates from the international law of occupation, which regulates the legislative, judicial and executive powers of the occupying state in the occupied territory. However, the utilisation of international law in adjudicating criminal matters within military courts in this region is sporadic. The underlying reasons for this practice call for inquiry and prompt a reconsideration of the optimal configuration of the legal regime.

This article contends that despite a recent uptake in integrating international law into military court decisions, its effectiveness in addressing criminal issues within these courts is limited. Moreover, in most cases presented before military courts, international law lags behind domestic legal doctrines, including Israeli criminal law. Despite its overarching authority, international law falls short of providing a pragmatic solution to the challenges confronted by military courts. Consequently, these courts are compelled to turn to alternative legal sources. The article proposes an integrated model, advocating reliance on international law for fundamental, constitutional-level issues while deferring to the Israeli criminal justice system for specific practical criminal matters.