Lecture on International Law

On Teaching International Law

The Use and Misuse of Comparative Constitutional Law (The George P. Smith Lecture in International Law)

This article examines the extent and nature of the use offoreign law in constitutional adjudication in common law systems outside the United States, with special reference to Australia. Demonstrating that the courts of other common law jurisdictions use foreign case law readily, naturally, and for a variety ofpurposes, the article reaches two broad conclusions: (1) as a generalization, other co...

Lecture 6—Law and Economics

InternatIonal Soft law

Although the concept of soft law has existed for years, scholars have not reached consensus on why states use soft law or even whether “soft law” is a coherent analytic category. In part, this confusion reflects a deep diversity in both the types of international agreements and the strategic situations that produce them. In this paper, we advance four complementary explanations for why states u...

International Law, International Relations and Compliance

Commitments are a persistent feature of international affairs. Disagreement over the effect of international commitments and the causes of compliance with them is equally persistent. Yet in the last decade the long-standing divide between those who believed that international rules per se shaped state behavior and those who saw such rules as epiphenomena1 or insignificant has given way to a mor...