Lessons learnt from two decades of international environmental agreements: law

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - As Patricia Birnie cautiously and prophetically put it in the inaugural issue of this journal (INEA 1, January 2001, p. 74),...     

Meeting the enemy: American exceptionalism and international law

Howard Zinn has been classified in a number of ways for his many social contributions. However, despite the breadth of his work, he has never been considered a criminologist. It is likely that this is the result of the inaccurate perceptions many Americans have about crime being a predominantly street‐level social problem. Zinn maintains that the social harms caused by those in positions of political and economic power are in fact crimes against humanity that are far more destructive and violent than the actions our legal system has historically deemed criminal. He also points to the ways our criminal justice system is unjust and ineffective, and has demonstrated how social inequality ensures that the disadvantaged will be further subordinated by the criminal justice system. Zinn’s critical contributions about the most significant sources of social harm, the unjust nature of the American justice system, and the influence of social inequality offer an unorthodox criminological perspective that deserves special consideration. His unconventional criminology calls for increasing social justice by means of political dissent, social resistance, and civil disobedience.     

The non-intervention doctrine and the protection of the basic needs of the human person in contemporary international law

Conclusion There appears a developing recognition by the international community that there are certain basic human needs that it is in the interests of the international community to ensure the protection of those needs and an international obligation placed upon states to ensure that the dignity of the human person is respected. Where a government is unwilling or unable to ensure such respect, then the international community may act, by forceful means if necessary, to give effect to those requirements.     

Protecting the Internet with international law

The Internet remains the odd child of international law. While forever more universal law venues such as conferences, edited volumes or research projects consider “the Internet” a peculiar, interesting aspect of its well-recognized disciplines, international scholarship fails to address the global network as a whole, stalling the application of the fully developed and well-suited international law apparatus to the global community's biggest contemporary challenge. “Internet governance” is still perceived by legal scholars as construed to international relations and, at best, a potential ground for soft law in a distant future. That is not the case: Internet governance, with all its challenges, has been shaping international law for almost two decades. The latest unveilings of the ways in which the Internet impacts global policies and laws caught the public eye with the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal and, previously, with the 2013 Snowden revelations, yet as surprising as they might have been to the average user, they are direct results of network's architecture and its governance model. This paper looks at the evolving concept of “Internet's public core” as an opportunity to bridge this dogmatic gap. We identify the scope and meaning of “Internet's core” and assess its legitimacy within existing international normative frameworks. We argue that the technical components crucial to the flawless operation of the global network, such as the Domain Name System and Internet's backbone networks, can be effectively protected with international law.