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  3. Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law

Established in 1946, this series produces high quality, reflective and innovative scholarship in the field of public international law. It published works on international law that are of a theoretical, historical, cross-disciplinary or doctrinal nature. The series also welcomes books providing insights from private international law, comparative law and transnational studies which inform international legal thought and practice more generally. The series seeks to publish views from diverse legal traditions and perspectives, and of any geographical origin. In this respect it invites studies offering regional perspectives on core problématiques of international law, and in the same vein, it appreciates contrasts and debates between diverging approaches. Accordingly, books offering new or less orthodox perspectives are very much welcome. Works of a generalist character are greatly valued and the series is also open to studies on specific areas, institutions or problems. Translations of the most outstanding works published in other languages are also considered. After seventy years, Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law sets the standard for international legal scholarship and will continue to define the discipline as it evolves in the years to come.

  • General Editors: Larissa van den Herik, Leiden University, Jean d'Aspremont, University of Manchester and Sciences Po Law School

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179 results in Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law

Page 1 of 9

Intervening in International Justice
  • Third States before Courts and Tribunals
  • Brian McGarry
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • The intervention of States in legal proceedings touches upon some of the most beguiling questions in international dispute settlement. These include questions of treaty interpretation, obligations erga omnes, the sources of judicial power and rulemaking, the nature of incidental proceedings, the Monetary Gold doctrine of indispensable parties, cross-fertilization between judicial and arbitral bodies, and principles of jurisdiction, party autonomy, and res judicata. As jurists and scholars tend to address these questions in isolation, however, each development in third-State practice has raised unimagined issues of first impression-such as the 2022 declarations of dozens of States exploring mass intervention before the International Court of Justice in Ukraine v. Russia, and the participation of neighbouring States without China's presence in the 2016 South China Sea arbitration. By applying conceptual, comparative, and historical approaches to international justice, this book instead offers a uniquely holistic assessment of the practice and prospective development of intervention.

The Individual in the Law and Practice of the International Court of Justice
  • Yusra Suedi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    01 June 2026
  • The World Court's exclusive resolution of inter-state disputes has become one of the cornerstones of its identity. This insightful critique challenges the implication that individuals have little importance in such disputes as a result, revealing their relevance in a myriad of disputes beyond those centered on violations of multilateral human rights treaties. Arguing for individuals' enhanced integration, it unveils a multitude of procedural practices with unquenched potential. It also carefully unpacks the Court's legal reasoning antithetical to individuals' critical relevance in traditionally state-centric territorial or maritime disputes, amongst others. Critically analysing and evaluating the legal and political underpinnings for the Court's approaches and state litigants' choices from a lens of social idealism, this pioneering study sheds light on the imbalance between individuals as key stakeholders in inter-state disputes and the degree to which they are treated as such in law and practice.

Merchants of Legalism
  • A History of State Responsibility (1870–1960)
  • Alan Tzvika Nissel
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • Since the United Nations finalised its Draft Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts in 2001, most of the attention has been on the codification history of the topic. Alan Nissel widens the historic lens to include the pre-United Nations origins, offering the first extensive study on the American contribution to the modern law of state responsibility. The book examines the recurring narrative of lawyers using international law to suit the particular needs of their clients in three key contexts: the US turn to international arbitration practice in the New World, the German theorisation of public law in the setting of its national unification, and the multilateral effort to codify international law within world bodies. This expanded historical framework not only traces the pre-institutional origins of the code, but also highlights the duality of State responsibility doctrines and the political environments from which they emerged.

Ghosts of International Law
  • The Figure of the Foreign Fighter in a Cultural Perspective
  • Alberto Rinaldi
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • Heroes and villains, idealists and mercenaries, freedom fighters and religious fanatics. Foreign fighters tend to defy easy classification. Good and bad images of the foreign combatant epitomize different conceptions of freedom and are used to characterize the rightness or wrongness of this actor in civil wars. The book traces the history of these figures and their afterlife. It does so through an interdisciplinary methodology employing law, history, and psychoanalytical theory, showing how different images of the foreign combatant are utilized to proscribe or endorse foreign fighters in different historical moments. By linking the Spanish, Angolan, and Syrian civil wars, the book demonstrates how these figures function as a precedent for later periods and how their heritage keeps haunting the imaginary of legal actors in the present.

International Law-Making by the International Court of Justice and International Law Commission
  • Partnership for Purpose in a Decentralized Legal Order
  • Omri Sender
  • Published online:
    22 October 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • The book provides an unparalleled account of the links that draw together the International Court of Justice and the International Law Commission, exposing the depth of the relationship between these central organs of the international legal system and its profound, unintended impact. By drawing upon historical records, as well as interviews with members of both organs, the book reveals that the original vision for interaction between the Court and the Commission has been lost in time. It inquires not only into the cross-fertilization that may be traced in the output of each body but also into the more subtle ties that they nurture; it also shows how even the rare occasions of disagreement attest to the strength of the inter-institutional relationship rather than undermine it. All this throws light on the largely intangible process of international law-making and challenges the notion that international legislation is the sole preserve of States.

The Functions of International Adjudication and International Environmental Litigation
  • Joshua Paine
  • Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • This book uses environmental disputes as a focus to develop a novel comparative analysis of the functions of international adjudication. Paine focuses on three challenges confronting international tribunals: managing change in applicable legal norms or relevant facts, determining the appropriate standard and method of review when scrutinising State conduct for compliance with international obligations, and contributing to wider processes of dispute settlement. The book compares how tribunals manage these challenges across four key sites of international adjudication: adjudication in the World Trade Organization and under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, International Court of Justice litigation, and investment treaty arbitration. It shows that while international tribunals perform several key functions in the contemporary international legal order, they are subject to significant constraints. Paine makes a genuine addition to literature on the role of international adjudication in international law which will benefit academics, practitioners, and policymakers.

Sustainable Development, International Law, and a Turn to African Legal Cosmologies
  • Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • This original book analyses and reimagines the concept of sustainable development in international law from a non-Western legal perspective. Built upon the intersection of law, politics, and history in the context of Africa, its peoples and their experiences, customary law and other legal cosmologies, this ground-breaking study applies a critical legal analysis to Africa's interaction with conceptualising and operationalising sustainable development. It proposes a turn to non-Western legal normativity as the foundational principle for reimagining sustainable development in international law. It highlights eco-legal philosophies and principles in remaking sustainable development where ecological integrity assumes a central focus in the reimagined conceptualisation and operationalisation of sustainable development. While this pioneering book highlights Africa as its analytical pivot, its arguments and proposals are useful beyond Africa. Connecting global discourses on nature, the environment, rights and development, Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah illuminates our current thinking on sustainable development in international law.

Demystifying Treaty Interpretation
  • Andrea Bianchi, Fuad Zarbiyev
  • Published online:
    07 March 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
  • Demystifying Treaty Interpretation doesn't just tell you how treaties are commonly interpreted. It helps you understand also the process of treaty interpretation and its outcomes. The idea that rules of treaty interpretation can guide us to the meaning of treaty provisions, in a simple and straightforward manner, is a myth to be dispelled. This book aims to capture some of the complex and nuanced processes involved in treaty interpretation. It spurs further reflection about how interpretation takes place against the background of concepts, categories, and insights from other disciplines. A useful tool for scholars, practitioners and researchers engaging with treaty interpretation at all levels, the book aims to enhance the reader's knowledge and mastery of the interpretive process in all its elements, with a view to making them more skilled and effective players in the game of interpretation.

The Rebirth of Territory
  • Gail Lythgoe
  • Published online:
    07 March 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
  • The concept of territory is central in international law, but a detailed analysis of how the concept is used in both discourse and practice has been lacking until now. Rather than reproducing the established understanding of territoriality within the international legal order, this study suggests that the discipline of international law relies on an outmoded spatial paradigm. Gail Lythgoe argues for a complete update and overhaul of our understanding of territory and space, to engage more effectively with key processes, structures and actors relevant to contemporary global governance. In this new theoretical account of an essential aspect of public international law, she argues that territory is a dynamic social reality created by the exercise of power. Territories are constituted by the practices of a more diverse array of actors than is acknowledged. As a result, functions are re-assembling in territories constituted by state and non-state actors alike.

Weaponising Evidence
  • A History of Tobacco Control in International Law
  • Margherita Melillo
  • Published online:
    11 January 2024
    Print publication:
    01 February 2024
  • Weaponising Evidence provides the first analysis of the history of the international law on tobacco control. By relying on a vast set of empirical sources, it analyses the negotiation of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and the tobacco control disputes lodged before the WTO and international investment tribunals (Philip Morris v Uruguay and Australia – Plain Packaging). The investigation focuses on two main threads: the instrumental use of international law in the warlike confrontation between the tobacco control advocates and the tobacco industry, and the use of evidence as a weapon in the conflict. The book unveils important lessons on the functioning of international organizations, the role of corporate actors and civil society organizations, and the importance and limits of science in law-making and litigation.

Collective Self-Defence in International Law
  • James A. Green
  • Published online:
    04 January 2024
    Print publication:
    25 January 2024
  • Collective self-defence can be defined as the use of military force by one or more states to aid another state that is an innocent victim of armed attack. However, it is a legal justification that is open to abuse and its exercise risks escalating conflict. Recent years have seen an unprecedented increase in the number of collective self-defence claims. It has been the main basis for US-led action in Syria (2014-) and was advanced by Russia in relation to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2022-). Yet there still has been little analysis of collective self-defence in international law. This book crucially progresses the debate on various fundamental and under-explored questions about the conceptual nature of collective self-defence and the requirements for its operation. Green provides the most detailed and extensive account of collective self-defence to date, at a time when it is being invoked more than ever before.

A Communitarian Theory of WTO Law
  • Chios Carmody
  • Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • Since 1995 there has been intense debate about whether the WTO Agreement is just. Many observers point to the association of the treaty with intensive interdependence and the disruptive effects of globalization to assert that it is unjust. Nevertheless, justice in sovereign terms is different from justice in human terms. This book puts forward a theory of WTO law to explain the difference and its implications for the international trading system. It details how economic interdependence gives rise to an interdependent view of the relationship between different forms of justice and to interdependent obligations in WTO law. It also suggests how the WTO dispute settlement system might have a residual value as a locus for transformative outcomes despite contemporary concerns about the system's political acceptability. Taken together, such insights may assist in identifying elements of a general theory of law.

The Justice Factory
  • Management Practices at the International Criminal Court
  • Richard Clements
  • Published online:
    01 December 2023
    Print publication:
    18 January 2024
  • Spend time at the International Criminal Court, and you will hear the familiar language of anti-impunity. Spend longer, and you will encounter the less familiar language of management – efficiency, risk, and performance, and tools of strategic planning, audit, and performance appraisal. How have these two languages fused within the primary institution of global justice? This book explores that question through an historical and conceptually layered account of management's effects on the ICC's global justice project. It historicises management, forcing international lawyers to look at the sites of struggle – from the plantation to the United Nations – that have shaped the court's managerial present. It traces the court's macro, micro and meso scales of management, showing how such practices have fashioned a vision of global justice at organisational, professional, and argumentative levels. And it asks how those who care about global justice might engage with managerial justice at an institution animated by forms, reforms, and the promise of optimisation.

National Governance and Investment Treaties
  • Between Constraint and Empowerment
  • Josef Ostřanský, Facundo Pérez Aznar
  • Published online:
    29 June 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023
  • Much of the existing accounts assume that investment treaties affect national governance. However, how exactly this happens has been subject to little analysis. Conventional accounts presume that these treaties improve national governance, leading to good governance and the rule of law for all. Critical accounts charge that investment treaties unduly empower foreign investors and cause a regulatory chill. On both accounts, investment treaties are expected to empower and constrain. Comparing extended case studies of Argentina, the Czech Republic, India and Mexico, this book shows how investment treaties influence national governance ideologically, institutionally, and socially. We show how the overarching role of IIAs in national governance – to cultivate constraining discipline in public administration – is realised and who gets empowered and marginalised in the process. The book's findings will serve in the debates about alternative ways of economic governance and help explain the investment treaty regime's significant resistance to change.

Drones and International Law
  • A Techno-Legal Machinery
  • Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi
  • Published online:
    31 May 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023
  • Through an analysis of the use of drones, Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi explores the ways in which, in the context of counterterrorism, war, technology and the law interact and reshape one another. She demonstrates that drone programs are techno-legal machineries that facilitate and accelerate the emergence of a new kind of warfare. This new model of warfare is individualized and de-materialized in the sense that it focuses on threat anticipation and thus consists in identifying dangerous figures (individualized warfare) rather than responding to acts of hostilities (material warfare). Revolving around threat anticipation, drone wars endure over an extensive timeframe and geographical area, to the extent that the use of drones may even be seen, as appears to be the case for the United States, as part of the normal functioning of the state, with profound consequences for the international legal order.

Who Owns Outer Space?
  • International Law, Astrophysics, and the Sustainable Development of Space
  • Michael Byers, Aaron Boley
  • Published online:
    06 April 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023
  • From Space debris to asteroid strikes to anti-satellite weapons, humanity's rapid expansion into Space raises major environmental, safety, and security challenges. In this book, Michael Byers and Aaron Boley, an international lawyer and an astrophysicist, identify and interrogate these challenges and propose actionable solutions. They explore essential questions from, 'How do we ensure all of humanity benefits from the development of Space, and not just the world's richest people?' to 'Is it possible to avoid war in Space?' Byers and Boley explain the essential aspects of Space science, international law, and global governance in a fully transdisciplinary and highly accessible way. Addressing the latest and emerging developments in Space, they equip readers with the knowledge and tools to engage in current and critically important legal, policy, and scientific debates concerning the future development of Space. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Reciprocity in Public International Law
  • Arianna Whelan
  • Published online:
    23 February 2023
    Print publication:
    02 March 2023
  • There is a common perception of reciprocity as a concept that is opposed to the communitarian interests that characterise contemporary international law, or merely a way of denoting reactions to unfriendly or wrongful conduct. This book disputes this approach, and highlights how reciprocity is instead linked to the structural characteristic of sovereign equality of States in international law. This book carries out an in-depth analysis of the concept of reciprocity and the elements that characterise it, before examining the various roles and articulations of reciprocity in a number of fields of public international law: the law of treaties, the treatment of individuals, the execution of international law, and the jurisdiction of international courts and tribunals. In all these areas, it analyses both more traditional and more contemporary examples, to demonstrate how reciprocity is closely linked to the very structure of public international law.

Making the World Safe for Investment
  • The Protection of Foreign Property 1922–1959
  • Andrea Leiter
  • Published online:
    23 February 2023
    Print publication:
    02 March 2023
  • Western governments, companies, economists and lawyers established the international legal order now known as international investment law to protect foreign property from a redistribution of wealth through domestic law making. This book offers a pre-history of these legal arrangements, focusing on the time before 1959 and the ratification of the first bilateral investment treaty and the ICSID Convention. It introduces new archival material, such as arbitral awards, diplomatic notes and concession agreements, as well as scholarly writings pertaining to developments in these proceedings. These materials are systematised into a coherent argument on the protection of foreign property. The book develops the important role of concession agreements and their internationalisation for the making of international investment law, thereby insisting on the private law character of the foundations of the field. In doing so it displays the analytic force of viewing law as jurisdictional practice, rather than as a system of norms.

The Necessity of Nature
  • God, Science and Money in 17th Century English Law of Nature
  • Mónica García-Salmones Rovira
  • Published online:
    16 February 2023
    Print publication:
    23 February 2023
  • To understand our current world crises, it is essential to study the origins of the systems and institutions we now take for granted. This book takes a novel approach to charting intellectual, scientific and philosophical histories alongside the development of the international legal order by studying the philosophy and theology of the Scientific Revolution and its impact on European natural law, political liberalism and political economy. Starting from analysis of the work of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle and John Locke on natural law, the author incorporates a holistic approach that encompasses global legal matters beyond the foundational matters of treaties and diplomacy. The monograph promotes a sustainable transformation of international law in the context of related philosophy, history and theology. Tackling issues such as nature, money, necessities, human nature, secularism and epistemology, which underlie natural lawyers' thinking, Associate Professor García-Salmones explains their enduring relevance for international legal studies today.

The Everyday Makers of International Law
  • From Great Halls to Back Rooms
  • Tommaso Soave
  • Published online:
    03 November 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2022
  • This book offers a unique insight into the inner workings of international courts and tribunals. Combining the rigour of the essay and the creativity of the novel, Tommaso Soave narrates the invisible practices and interactions that make up the dispute settlement process, from the filing of the initial complaint to the issuance of the final decision. At each step, the book unravels the myriad activities of the legal experts running the international judiciary – judges, arbitrators, agents, counsel, advisors, bureaucrats, and specialized academics – and reveals their pervasive power in the process. The cooperation and competition among these inner circles of professionals lie at the heart of international judicial decisions. By shedding light on these social dynamics, Soave takes the reader on a journey through the lives, ambitions, and preoccupations of the everyday makers of international law.

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