In June 2022, a Russian-linked ransomware group attacked the Costa Rican government, targeting over twenty-seven agencies and sending Costa Rica’s healthcare system “into a spiral.”
January
2025
International Law
A Response to Profs. Anupam Chander & Paul Schwartz’s Privacy and/or Trade.
The European Union is not doing enough to protect farm animal welfare—at least, so say animal rights activists and their fellow travelers.
When a passenger suffers injuries on an international flight, any claim for damages against the airline must be brought under the Montreal Convention, a multilateral treaty governing the liability of air carriers.
When British authorities dragged Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London in April 2019, the Australian-born founder of the whistleblowing platform, WikiLeaks, was no stranger to displacement.
The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the court-created “act of state” doctrine, and other common-law immunities shield foreign officials and governments from most lawsuits. For instance, courts have dismissed claims against China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia over allegations of torture, detentions, and election interference. Yet foreign governments have unfettered access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs. And foreign dictatorships—including Russia, China, Turkey, and Venezuela—have leveraged this access to harass political dissidents, critics, and even newspapers in the United States. These doctrines create an asymmetry at the heart of this Article: foreign dictators and their proxies can access our courts as plaintiffs to harass their opponents, but their regimes are, in turn, immune from lawsuits here. This Article exposes that asymmetry and argues that U.S. courts and Congress should make it harder for foreign dictators to abuse our legal system.
Data privacy has been at the forefront of recent foreign-policy conversations.
The president must go! Thus rings the call across many democracies, including our own.
Our recent article, War Manifestos, was the first work of legal scholarship to examine the documents that set out the legal reasons sovereigns provided for going to war from the late fifteenth century until the mid-twentieth century.
The UN Charter provides that states are prohibited from the “threat or use of force” against other sovereign states.