The legal regime regulating cross-border investment gives key rights to foreign investors and places significant duties on states hosting that investment. It also raises distinctive moral questions due to its potential to constrain a state’s ability to manage its economy and protect its people. Yet international investment law remains virtually untouched as a subject of philosophical inquiry. The questions of international political morality surrounding investment rules can be mapped through the lens of two critiques of the law – that it (...) systemically takes advantage of the global South and that it constrains the policy choices of states hosting investment. Each critique contains certain moral and empirical assumptions that deserve further attention. The distributive justice implications of international investment rules are also relevant to scholars of global distributive justice. The aim of the analysis is to develop an interdisciplinary agenda – among law, philosophy, and social science – for inquiry into the justice of investment law and reform of its unjust elements. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of Chiara Lepora and Robert Goodin's On Complicity and Compromise (OUP, 2013) for our understanding of international law. That volume systematizes and evaluates individuals’ ethical choices in getting (too) close to evil acts. For the law of nations, these concepts are relevant in three critical ways. First, they capture the dilemmas of those charged with implementing international law, e.g., Red Cross delegates pledged to confidentiality learning of torture in a prison. Second, they offer a rubric (...) for understanding when a state may use coercion against certain actors, e.g., international law's rules for when one state may use force against another based on the latter's ties to terrorist acts. Third, they offer a moral grounding for many international obligations of states based on the need to avoid their own complicity in others' wrongs, e.g., by not expelling refugees to a state persecuting them or by preventing private actors from committing human rights abuses. In the case of the last two, the law reflects decisions by states about how much complicity they will tolerate – either complicity by others or complicity by the states themselves. (shrink)

Offering a new interdisciplinary approach to global justice and integrating the insights of international relations and contemporary ethics, this book asks whether the core norms of international law are just by appraising them according to a standard of global justice grounded in the advancement of peace and protection of human rights.

International law and ethics share a common goal of helping us understand the norms and institutions needed to promote a just world order. Yet each of the two fields has approached this shared task with little regard for the insights of other, and interdisciplinary collaboration is now imperative. This essay shows the complementary nature of inquiries in political and moral philosophy, on the one hand, and international law, on the other, by examining the so-called New Haven School (or policy-oriented jurisprudence), (...) an international law method that explicitly considers values as both inputs and outputs of the process of making law. It finds that the School’s sociological orientation does not adequately integrate ethical inquiries essential to prescribing law, in particular questions about the scope of duties that individuals and states owe those abroad. Using the current legal debate over the extraterritorial application of human rights as an example, the paper shows how approaches from moral and political philosophy can help provide a rigorous and principled basis for the prescription of law, as well as link seemingly unrelated questions of international law to each other. (shrink)

The codification of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and the accession to those treaties by a large majority of states, does not at first glance seem to have any significant effect upon states' behavior in situations of crisis. Any understanding of the prospects for such law in these situations requires an appraisal of both the motivations of states in concluding these treaties and the pressures on them to ignore them. This paper analyzes those motivations and temptations through (...) the framework of precommitment theory, a component of rational choice theory, originally articulated by Jon Elster and Thomas Schelling. The metaphor of Ulysses offers a useful way to address three different dimensions of the purposes that states join treaties: beliefs, i.e., the state's attitude toward the norms in the treaty; predictions, the state's concerns about its own future behavior; and interactions, i.e., the extent to which the state is trying to influence or bind other states. And it permits linking those motivations to the propensity of states to comply at a later time. The paper offers a four-part typology for why states commit to such treaties, contrasting it with notions from contemporary international relations theories. It then explores the contrasting approaches of compliance theories and international law doctrine to the temptation of states to violate treaties and elaborates the contributions of the precommitment framework. Building upon that framework, it proposes a set of strategies that those concerned with compliance might explore for making international law more relevant when governments seem most inclined to discount it. (shrink)

This volume presents human rights in action, focussing on their effectiveness as legal tools designed to benefit human beings. By combining conceptual analysis with an emphasis on procedures and mechanisms of implementation, it provides a multidimensional overview of human rights. Beginning with an analysis of the historical and conceptual foundations of human rights, the volume then focusses upon the different mechanisms which may be employed in translating human rights from a promise into a reality. Special emphasis is placed upon the (...) United Nations procedures available to achieve this end. (shrink)