Month: October 2021

Stockholm Declaration conference: link available to video of conference start, including panel on rights-based approach

Miss the opportunity to see our “The 1972 Stockholm Declaration at 50: Reflecting on a Half-Century of International Environmental Law” live on October 8?

No worries: We at the Dean Rusk International Law Center and the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, University of Georgia School of Law, are happy to provide videolinks.

This daylong conference addressed, in the words of MJ Durkee, the Georgia Law faculty member who conceptualized it,

“one of the foremost challenges of our time: What the international community can do about the crises facing our environment and the link between environmental health and human flourishing.”

Durkee, who is Associate Dean for International Programs, Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center, and Allen Post Professor, further noted the timeliness of the conference:


“The Stockholm Declaration, in addition to launching the field of international environmental law 50 years ago, was also among the first to articulate the idea of a human right to a healthy environment, and to elevate this as a matter of world concern. Just today, in Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council has been deliberating over a resolution recognizing that this human right to a healthy environment has matured into an internationally recognized human right.”

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Also in this segment is the first of three panels, entitled “The Rights-Based Approach to Environmental Protection,” and featuring a global array of panelists: Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, pictured at bottom center; Tyler Giannini, Clinical Professor and Co-Director of the Harvard Human Rights Program and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law, top right; Kate Mackintosh, Executive Director, Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA Law, middle left; Katie O’Bryan, Lecturer, Monash University, Australia, middle right; and moderator Diane Marie Amann, Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at Georgia Law, top left.

Her welcome, as well as introductory remarks from Georgia Law Dean Peter B. “Bo” Rutledge and Eva Hunnius Ohlin, Senior Advisor for Energy and Environment at the Embassy of Sweden in Washington, D.C., appear in the first of three conference video segments, available here.

Principle 1 of the Stockholm Declaration begins:

“Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being …”

Considering that claim in relation to “humankind,” panelists explored a range of issues, including: the utility, or not, of the rights-based approach; comparison of the rights-based approach with others, including the rights of nature and harmony with nature; and the recent civil-society promulgation of a definition of the international crime of ecocide, with the aim of amending the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to include this crime.

Interested in other segments of our Stockholm conference? Stay tuned.

(Update: The full series of links is available here.)

Georgia Law Professor Harlan Cohen talks “Sources of International Law” in Borderline Justice podcast

Harlan Cohen, who is Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law, discusses “Sources of International Law” in a podcast released this month.

He appeared on Borderline Jurisprudence, a podcast devoted to “philosophy and jurisprudence of international law,” in the words of its founders, Başak Etkin, Teaching and Research Fellow at Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, France, and Kostia Gorobets, Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

The conversation with Cohen covered an array of issues, including sources of international law, precedent, opinio juris, fragmentation, pluralism, and behavioral approaches to international law. Writings by Cohen and others, detailed in a bibliography available here, formed a foundation for the talk.

The 53-minute podcast may be accessed at Anchor FM, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

International Law Colloquium returns to Georgia Law in Spring 2022 semester

The International Law Colloquium, a time-honored tradition here at the University of Georgia School of Law, returns this spring semester with another great lineup of global legal experts.

This for-credit course consists of presentations of substantial works-in-progress on a variety of international law topics by prominent scholars from other law schools. In keeping with a tradition established when the series began in 2006, students will write reaction papers on the scholars’ manuscripts, and then discuss the papers with the authors in class. Leading the class will be Harlan G. Cohen, Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center. Other Georgia Law and university faculty will join in the dialogues.

Further supporting the colloquium are staff at our Center; in particular, the Center’s Global Practice Preparation team, which includes Sarah Quinn and Catrina Martin. The colloquium further benefits from generous support from the Kirbo Trust Endowed Faculty Enhancement Fund and the Talmadge Law Faculty Fund.

Presenting at the Spring 2022 Colloquium (pictured above, clockwise from top left):

► January 21: Kristen Eichensehr, University of Virginia School of Law 

► January 28: Rebecca Hamilton, American University Washington College of Law 

► February 11: Asli Ü. Bâli, UCLA Law

► February 25: Rebecca Crootof, University of Richmond School of Law 

► March 4: Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg, Universidad del Pacífico, Perú  

► March 18: Sarah Nouwen, European University Institute, Italy, and University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

► April 1: Maggie Gardner, Cornell Law School

► April 15: Julian Arato, Brooklyn Law School 

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann gives talks on “Femmes d’exception au procès de Nuremberg” during journey to Lyon, France

Georgia Law’s Diane Marie Amann is back from France, where last week she presented, at three venues, her ongoing research regarding women who worked at first post-World War II international criminal trial in Nuremberg, Germany.

Her journey, which occurred at the invitation of and with support from the U.S. State Department’s Consulate General in Lyon, coincided with the 75th anniversary of the International Military Tribunal : on September 30-October 1, 1946, the yearlong IMT trial ended with the reading of a verdict that convicted most of the twenty-one Nazis on trial; some of them also were sentenced to die by hanging.

The talks by Amann, who is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law, were as follows:

► At the Hôtel de Ville de Lyon, or Lyon City Hall, at a Thursday luncheon honoring the anniversary, she summarized her research (pictured above at upper right). It focuses on 6 women who worked at the IMT as lawyers or in other professional capacities, including analyst, translator, and interpreter. The group includes at least one woman from each of the Allied nations – from France, Great Britain, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the United States – that conducted the trial.

► At the Faculté de Droit Julie-Victoire Daubié, Université Lumière Lyon 2, she presented “Les femmes et le droit : l’exemple des procès internationaux de Nuremberg” (“Women and Law: The Example of the Nuremberg International Trials”) to a hundred or so law students (above at lower right), as part of the law faculty’s year-long celebration, including a “Pionnières : Les femmes et le droit” (“Pioneers: Women and Law”) lecture series, of its namesake Daubié, who, 160 years ago, was the first woman to earn a bachelor’s degree in law there. Amann’s talk linked the experiences of Nuremberg women to those of women and persons belonging to other underrepresented groups in the field of international law today.

► At Maison d’Izieu, the site of a onetime children’s home in a village located near the Alps, about 65 miles east of Lyon, Amann presented “Le rôle des avocates et autres femmes d’exception au procès de Nuremberg” (“The Role of Lawyers and Other Women of Exception at the Nuremberg Trial”) (above at left). Her talk formed part of a daylong conference entitled “Actualité du procès de Nuremberg, 75 ans après” (“News about the Nuremberg Trial 75 Years Later”). Her talk focused on the only woman lawyer in the French delegation, Docteur-Maître-Juge Aline Chalufour (video here, at 2:14:40). Other speakers, among them Stéphanie Boissard, Matthias Gemählich, Jean-Paul Jean, Xavier-Jean Keita, Michel Massé, Guillaume Mouralis, and Philippe Sands, discussed other members of the French delegation, the trial as a whole, and its impact on contemporary trials at the International Criminal Court and other forums.

Georgia Law scholars MJ Durkee and Harlan Cohen to take part next week in International Law Weekend, annual meeting of American Branch of International Law Association

Two scholars on the international law faculty here at the University of Georgia School of Law will take part next week in International Law Weekend 2021, the annual meeting of the American Branch of the International Law Association. Typically held in New York, the meeting, for which Georgia Law is proud to be a Gold-Level Sponsor, will take place online this year on account of the pandemic. This year’s theme is “Reinvesting in International Law.” Registration is now open here.

Both professors will be featured on Friday, October 29 – as follows:

9-10:15 a.m. Outsourcing International Responsibility

Melissa J. “MJ” Durkee, who is Associate Dean for International Programs, Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center, and Allen Post Professor at Georgia Law, will moderate and contribute to this panel, which will consider how attribution is handled in the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts issued twenty years ago by the United Nations’ International Law Commission. Durkee and other panelists – Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law, Chimène Keitner of California-Hastings Law, and Alex Mills of the Faculty of Laws at University College London – will consider the following question:

When the state outsources public functions to private actors and holds stock in private companies, when should it be responsible for environmental disasters, military activities, cyber-attacks, and other violations of international law?

10:30-11:45 a.m. The Geopolitics of Economic Competition

Harlan G. Cohen, who is Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at Georgia Law, will moderate this panel, which will map the new terrain of global competitive anxiety. Panelists Lauren Brown (Georgia Law JD’19) of Squire Patton Boggs, Sarah Bauerle Danzman of Indiana University Bloomington, Margaret Lewis of Seton Hall Law, and Henrique Choer Moraes of the Embassy of Brazil in New Zealand, will lay out various state policies being adopted, explores the choices facing those caught in the potential crosshairs, and further consider the ways in which international law and its regimes are being challenged, restructured, and reformed. The discussion promises to tell a story of flux and change from the viewpoint of the globe, the state, and the individual.

The full ILW program, which includes keynote addresses by many dignitaries, is here. Registration, which is free for students, is here.

Georgia Law Professor Harlan Cohen publishes chapter on sociology of World Trade Organization precedents

Harlan Cohen, who is Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law, has contributed a chapter entitled “Culture Clash: The Sociology of WTO Precedent” to a just-published essay collection.

The chapter appears in Precedents as Rules and Practice, a volume published by C.H.Beck/Hart/Nomos. Co-editors are Dr. Amalie Frese of European University Institute, Florence, Italy, and Julius Schumann of the University of Vienna.

Here’s the SSRN abstract for Professor Cohen’s chapter:

Thanks to the United States, the WTO Appellate Body can no longer hear appeals. Having blocked all appointments to the body, the United States has left its bench empty, with no members to fulfill its role. Among the United States’ justifications: The Appellate Body’s adoption of an apparent doctrine of precedent.

This chapter takes a deeper look at the fight over precedent at the WTO, both as a case study in the emergence and operation of precedent within international law and as a microcosm of the cultural conflicts playing out within the WTO. The chapter develops an account of precedent as a product of three overlapping, inter-dependent, and mutually constructed logics: (1) the jurisprudential, (2) the rational, and (3) the sociological. It then uses these three logics to retell the story of precedent at the WTO – the emerging patterns of argumentative practice, the Appellate Body’s adoption of a doctrinal test, and the escalating U.S. opposition to the “cogent reasons” standard that body applied. Seeing the fight over precedent as a function of all three logics reveals the real cultural fights for control of the WTO community of practice. Seeing that community of practice coalesce around and split over unwritten practices of precedent reveals how international law develops as much as a function of culture, training, and practice as of rules and power.