This book challenges the idea that international law looks the same from anywhere in the world. Instead, how international lawyers understand and approach their field is often deeply influenced by the national contexts in which they lived, studied, and worked. International law in the United States and in the United Kingdom looks different compared to international law in China and Russia, though some approaches (particularly Western, Anglo-American ones) are more influential outside their borders than others. Given shifts in geopolitical power and the rise of non-Western powers like China, it is increasingly important for international lawyers to understand how others coming from diverse backgrounds approach the field. By examining the international law academies and textbooks of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Roberts provides a window into these different communities of international lawyers, and she uncovers some of the similarities and differences in how they understand and approach international law.

A runner-up for the 2018 Chadwick Alger Prize, International Studies Association's International Organization Section, this provocative reassessment of the rule of law in world politics examines how and why governments use and manipulate international law in foreign policy.

Explains that international law is not a monolith but can encompass on-going contestation, in which states set forth competing interpretations Maps and explains the cross-country differences in international legal norms in various fields of international law and their application and interpretation in different geographic regions Organized into three broad thematic sections of conceptual matters, domestic institutions and comparative international law, and comparing approaches across issue-areas Chapters authored by contributors who include top international law and comparative law scholars all from diverse backgrounds, experience, and perspectives.

This book brings a new perspective to the subject of international investment law, by tracing the origins of foreign investor rights. It shows how a group of business leaders, bankers, and lawyers in the mid-twentieth century paved the way for our current system of foreign investment relations, and the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism.

Every year, states negotiate, conclude, sign, and give effect to hundreds of new international agreements. Koremenos argues that the detailed design provisions of such agreements matter for phenomena that scholars, policymakers, and the public care about: when and how international cooperation occurs and is maintained. Theoretically, Koremenos develops hypotheses regarding how cooperation problems like incentives to cheat can be confronted and moderated through law's detailed design provisions. Empirically, she exploits her data set composed of a random sample of international agreements in economics, the environment, human rights and security. Her theory and testing lead to a consequential discovery: considering the vagaries of international politics, international cooperation looks more law-like than anarchical, with the detailed provisions of international law chosen in ways that increase the prospects and robustness of cooperation. This nuanced and sophisticated 'continent of international law' can speak to scholars in any discipline where institutions, and thus institutional design, matter.

Should states intervene in situations outside of their own territory in order to safeguard or promote the common good? In this book, Cedric Ryngaert addresses this key question, looking at how the international law of state jurisdiction can be harnessed to serve interests common to the international community. The author inquires how the purpose of the law of jurisdiction may shift from protecting national interests to furthering international concerns, such as those relating to the global environment and human rights. Such a shift is enabled by the instability of the notion of jurisdiction, as well as the interpretative ambiguity of the related notions of sovereignty and territoriality. There is no denying that, in the real world, 'selfless intervention' by states tends to combine with more insular considerations. This book argues, however, that such considerations do not necessarily detract from the legitimacy of unilateralism, but may precisely serve to trigger the exercise of jurisdiction in the common interest.

This work, the outgrowth of a joint reflection by French and German international lawyers, attempts to reconceptualize the doctrine of hierarchy in international law by emphasizing that a clear distinction should be drawn between primary rules, which encapsulate precepts for the protection of the basic values of the international community, and secondary rules, which determine the regime of legal consequences flowing from a breach of such rules of conduct.