International Law

This Article by Marco Basile argues that U.S. constitutional law and international law diverged after the Civil War when courts came to apply them differently against the state as the United States consolidated a continental nation-state. On one hand, the Supreme Court came to assert authority over constitutional law more aggressively in the context of gutting Reconstruction in the South. At the same time, the Court stepped back from international law in deference to Congress as the United States conquered territories and peoples in the West. The simultaneous rise of judicial supremacy as to constitutional law and of judicial deference as to international law recast constitutional law as more “legal” than political and international law as more “political” than legal. By recovering the earlier understanding of public law, this Article challenges how we construct constitutional traditions from the past. The Article ultimately invites us to reimagine a more integrated public law today.

In today’s competitive global economy, U.S. companies upholding strict labor and human rights standards increasingly face unfair competition from foreign firms that exploit forced labor. In this Essay, we argue that this exploitation is not just a grave human rights crisis but also a serious market distortion that disadvantages ethical businesses in the United States and elsewhere.
This Essay outlines a strategic approach to confront this unfairly uneven playing field. Beyond simply deploying the existing legal tools, we propose a unified federal enforcement strategy and smarter trade agreements with enforceable labor standards. We also propose affirmative incentives, including procurement preferences and legal safe harbors, for companies that invest in ethical sourcing. The final component to the integrated strategy we propose is greater investment in traceability technologies and public-private partnerships to identify and root out forced labor deep within supply chains. Ultimately, we outline a forward-looking blueprint to ensure fair and competitive markets for U.S. businesses, ones that reward integrity and drive a global race to the top in labor practices. Economic competitiveness and human dignity, we argue, must be pursued together, not treated as competing priorities.

This Case Note summarizes the primary holdings surrounding Ninestar Corp, focusing on the resulting predicament for the FLETF. By revealing more information to regulated firms about its Entity List determination procedures, the FLETF could force firms to seek administrative remedy before they could access the courts, thereby retaining greater control over UFLPA enforcement; yet, in doing so, it may enable firms to circumvent Entity List designation. This Case Note ultimately concludes that forced labor enforcement regime is best served by greater transparency in the Entity List designation process.

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 the US constitutional system, the executive branch generally conducts foreign relations. But in recent years, the nonexecutive branches—the judiciary and Congress—have challenged the exclusivity of the president’s authority to conduct foreign relations by opening direct channels of communication with foreign governments’ executive branches.

Political sociologist Claus Offe has diagnosed the participatory deficit in North Atlantic democracies as the product of an imbalance in state–market relations. When the market is supreme, public policy can do little to constrain the market’s ever-expanding realms.

The European Union was founded in the 1950s as an experiment in postwar regional integration, in part to help rebuild national economies damaged by World War II through economic integration, and in part to ward off, by means of closer legal and political integration of states, the threat of totalitarianism and Soviet expansion.

In his farewell address, George Washington urged that “[t]he great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is . . . to have with them as little political connection as possible.”