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Begin New Search Journal The Journal of International Law and International Relations

11. Identifying the Source and Nature of a State's Political Obligation Towards International Law

Author:
Shirley V. Scott
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
It is not 'new' to be interested in the relationship between international law and its political context. It is not even 'new' to theorize connections between the two—consider Abram Chayes's 1974 functionalist analysis of the role of international law in the Cuban Missile Crisis,1 or the work of the New Haven scholars. In seeking to respond to the query as to what I thought had been achieved through the interdisciplinary dialogue of the last ten to fifteen years, I have avoided the temptation to summarize the history of inter-disciplinary scholarship or to offer a panoramic overview of recent publications in the field. I have instead taken as my stepping-off point literature in key mainstream journals of both disciplines written on the 'core' issue of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. If interdisciplinary enquiry has really 'gotten somewhere' over the last ten to fifteen years, it is here, at the heart of each discipline, that its presence should be making an impact.
Political Geography:
Iraq

12. Duelling Agendas: International Relations and International Law (Again)

Author:
Gerry Simpson
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
On a sunlit summer's day in the Chiltern Hills, five men are seen running towards the same spot in the middle of a field. The object of their attention is a hot-air balloon containing a small boy. The boy's uncle (the balloon's pilot) is holding onto the balloon's ropes in an increasingly frantic attempt to prevent the balloon and boy from being swept into the sky. The (now) six men then engage in a collective effort to bring the balloon under control but this becomes difficult as the wind picks up and the problems of collective action emerge. With each new gust of wind the dilemma becomes more acute. The balloon is lifted higher and higher off the ground, and, yet, it does seem as if the six men might just command the weight and strength to hold down the balloon. But no one is entirely sure. Who is the first to let go? No one is sure of that either but someone releases the rope and tumbles onto the ground. The balloon rises a little higher. Another man lets the rope go and drops to the ground. In the end, there is one man, Dr John Logan, hanging on to the rope of a rising balloon. He begins climbing up the rope (now high in the sky), but this is to no avail. The first Chapter of Ian McEwan's novel, Enduring Love, ends with Logan dropping to the ground from a great height.

13. The Evolution of International Environmental Cooperation

Author:
Elizabeth R. DeSombre
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
International environmental cooperation is a relatively new endeavor, appearing in a currently recognizable form within the last century, and becoming a major part of international relations only in the last three or four decades. During its brief history, the issues on which states have cooperated pertaining to the environment have shifted, as have the characteristics of the cooperative institutions established to address them. Some of these changes have come about because over time the environmental problems being addressed internationally have become more complex, both environmentally and politically. International environmental agreements, unlike some other areas of public international law, bind states, but for compliance require behaviour change primarily by private substate actors. The incentive structure in the agreements for these substate actors can thus have implications for how they are implemented. These incentive structures in collective self-regulation have changed from early agreements in which those substate actors whose behaviours needed to change directly benefited from their actions to protect a resource, to one in which the regulated industry gains little inherent advantage from being regulated. The time lag between activities that have environmental impacts and the manifestation of harm has increased as well (and, conversely, the time between taking action to protect the environment and the beneficial effects of that action has increased). Both these issues relate to a change in types of uncertainty underlying global environmental problems. Other changes in the nature of the environmental problems being regulated have led to an increasing degree of influence on the part of developing countries in international environmental agreements. Despite this increased complexity, multilateral environmental agreements have continued to be a powerful tool for mitigating difficult environmental problems.

14. Rethinking International Environmental Regimes: What Role for Partnership Coalitions?

Author:
Christopher C. Joyner
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
Governments create international agreements to deal with environmental, economic, technological, and legal problems that they cannot solve by themselves. In the absence of a supranational government, governments of states realize that they need new rules, multilateral institutions, and governance structures to promote cooperation, prevent and resolve conflicts, and facilitate information sharing between like-minded parties. This strategy is particularly evident in the establishment over the past four decades of several international regulatory regimes for the protection and management of certain environmental conditions of worldwide concern.

15. Legitimacy in Global Environmental Governance

Author:
Steven Bernstein
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
Writing in 1999, Daniel Bodansky predicted that the question of legitimacy would 'emerge from the shadows and become a central issue in international environmental law.' Specifically, Bodansky worried that as authority over environmental policy moved increasingly from domestic to international settings, perceptions that decision-making processes are 'insufficiently democratic' would increase. Such concerns were already simmering in other arenas of global governance. Jürgen Habermas, for example, used similar language nearly ten years earlier in anticipating a legitimacy problem in Europe, commenting that, 'the democratic processes constituted at the level of the nation-state lag hopelessly behind the economic integration taking place at a supranational level.' Both authors, in different ways, worried that the reconfiguration of political authority might not keep pace or adapt appropriately to globalizing pressures. Few topics could be more appropriate for the inaugural issue of a journal devoted to the intersection of International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL).
Political Geography:
Europe

16. The World Trade Organization in 2020

Author:
Steve Charnovitz
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
The inauguration of a new international journal and the commencement of the second decade of the World Trade Organization (WTO) together provide an opportunity to reflect on the WTO's legacy and its future. Government policies are always experiments, as Jan Tumlir explained. To date, the experiment of the WTO has achieved success beyond the expectation of many observers. What lies ahead? The leading international trade law casebook admits that '[i]t is hard to tell what may happen in the future.' Still, we should try to discern the horizon as part of our efforts to improve future conditions in international economic governance.

17. Why Constitutionalism Now? Text, Context and the Historical Contingency of Ideas

Author:
Jeffrey L. Dunoff
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
I am pleased to contribute to the first issue of the Journal of International Law International Relations. In this short essay, I wish to comment upon the current debate over constitutionalism at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and use this debate to reflect on the interdisciplinary nature of trade law scholarship and some of the current challenges facing international law. To do so, I will review the three leading accounts of WTO constitutionalism found in the legal literature. I will then suggest that these otherwise divergent views of constitutionalism share an impulse to channel or minimize world trade politics. Paradoxically, however, the call for constitutionalism has sparked precisely the sort of politics that it seeks to pre-empt. Hence, one part of this article will be devoted to illustrating the self-defeating nature of the turn to constitutionalism.

18. Critiquing the Critics of Economic Globalization

Author:
Michael J. Trebilcock
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
Globalization is the great buzz-word of our times, although it lacks any common or agreed definition. It could mean as many different things as globalization of human rights values through United Nations Declarations and Covenants, the creation of War Crimes Tribunals, the International Criminal Court and the Land Mines Treaty, or the globalization of core labour standards through the International Labour Organization (ILO), or the globalization of environmental values through the Kyoto Protocol, but typically this is not what the so-called anti-globalists have in mind. Rather, they fundamentally object to the process of international trade and investment liberalization (economic globalization) that has occurred in the post-war years as reflected in the following summary numbers: from 1950 to 1999 the average annual growth rate of world real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 3.8 per cent; the average annual growth rate in the trade of goods over this period was 6.2 per cent; from 1980 to 1999 the average annual growth rate in the trade of services was 7.0 per cent; from 1982 to 1999 the average annual growth rate in the stock of foreign direct investment (FDI) was 13 per cent.

19. When you Come to a Fork in the Road, Take it; Reflections on North American Integration: Regional and Multilateral

Author:
Sylvia Ostry
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
The title of this article was coined by the great American philosopher Yogi Berra. There are many roads that lead to greater economic integration or ever-tighter linkages among countries. Globalization is, indeed, an ongoing process of deepening integration fed by trade, financial flows, direct investment, production networks and increasingly by the technological revolution in information and communication. So it is not necessary to choose one route in, for example, trade policy. In the Western Hemisphere bilateral, regional and multilateral policies are all being pursued. Moreover, there are many facets of integration that go beyond economic linkage but we tend to think mainly of trade and investment as primary and pay far less attention to other avenues.
Political Geography:
North America

20. Marriage and Civil Partnership for Same-Sex Couples: The International Imperative

Author:
Kenneth McK. Norrie
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of International Law and International Relations
Institution:
Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto
Abstract:
Within the single month of November 2004, Saskatchewan became the latest Canadian province to accept same-sex marriage, South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal held the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples to be unconstitutional, the United Kingdom became the latest European country to introduce civil partnerships as an institution for same-sex couples analogous to marriage, and the government of New Zealand presented a Bill to the New Zealand Parliament to do the same thing in that country. In the 15 years since Denmark became the first country in the world to introduce such an institution most jurisdictions in Western Europe and in Canada, and a handful of states in the United States of America, have followed Denmark's innovation and some have opened up the institution of marriage itself to same-sex couples. The peculiarly North American debate whether civil partnership is a second-rate alternative to marriage as a means of achieving gay and lesbian equality has not been engaged with elsewhere in the world, and it will not be engaged with here. This article intends, rather, to explore the remarkable phenomenon that such a debate is today one of practical reality rather than hypothetical aspiration.
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, South Africa, Denmark, and New Zealand