Think Global—Towards International Consumer Law

Think Again: International Trade

True. In low-income countries, openness to international trade is indispensable for rapid economic growth. Indeed, few developing nations have grown rapidly over time without simultaneous increases in both exports and imports, and virtually all developing countries that have grown rapidly have done so under open trade policies or declining trade protection. India and China are the best recent e...

On Teaching International Law

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...

One-Way Contracts: Consumer Protection without Law

What if consumer contracts were legally enforceable only against the consumers, but not against the business? This paper, part of my project on the ‘myths of consumer protection,’ describes a regime of ‘one-way contracts’–contracts between consumers and business to which only consumers are bound, the business is not. A breaching business would face no contractual liability. The paper argues tha...