International Law

Contemporary regulation of new digital technologies by nation-states unfolds under a darkening shadow of geopolitical competition. Three recent monographs offer illuminating and complementary maps of these geopolitical conflicts. Folding together insights from all three books opens up a new, more perspicacious understanding of geopolitical dynamics. This perspective, informed by all three books under consideration here, suggests grounds for skepticism about the emergence of a deep regulatory equilibrium centered on the emerging slate of European laws. The area of overlap will be strictly limited to less important questions by growing bipolar geostrategic conflict between the United States and China. Ambitions for global regulatory convergence when it comes to new digital technology, therefore, should be modest.

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.”

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.

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.