Making Sense of Customary International Law

A State Preferences Account of Customary International Law Adjudication

The standard account today of customary international law (CIL) is that it arises from the widespread and consistent practice of states followed out of a sense of legal obligation. Although commonly recited, this account is plagued by evidentiary, normative, and conceptual difficulties, and it has been subjected to increasing criticism in recent years. This paper posits a different account of C...

The Formation of Customary Law

Making Sense of Intellectual Property Law

Intellectual property (IP) scholars have long struggled to explain the boundaries of and differences between copyright and patent law. This Article proposes a novel explanation: copyright and patent can be fruitfully understood as establishing a dichotomy between two different groups of human senses. Copyright traditionally involves objects addressed to the senses of sight and hearing while pro...

The Emerging Customary Law of Space

The Political Economy of “Aboriginal Customary Law”

Discussions about aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations in Canada have stressed the need to recognize “aboriginal customary law” in self-government arrangements. It is maintained that many aspects of “native law” differ radically from the legal systems that emerged in European countries, and so imposing Canadian conceptions of law on aboriginal communities is an obstacle to native self-determinat...