This book presents policymakers and scholars with an over-arching analytical model of international law, one that demonstrates the potential of international law, but also explains how policymakers should choose among different international legal structures.

Voitovich presents a clear and lucid discussion of the manner and form in which international economic organizations (IEOs) participate in two main stages of the international legal process: law making and law implementation. The book is based on normative instruments and fragments of practice of about fifty IEOs. In order to ensure a proper and timely realization of their normative acts, IEOs exercise a number of law implementing functions which are subject to a thorough comparative examination. The author concludes that existing IEOs, not being ideal institutional models, possess a sufficient arsenal of law implementing instruments to make a considerable impact on the international legal regulations in the economic field. The book will be of interest to academics and economic political scientists.

The Oxford Handbook of International Legal Theory provides an accessible and authoritative guide to the major thinkers, concepts, approaches, and debates that have shaped contemporary international legal theory. The Handbook features 48 original essays by leading international scholars from a wide range of traditions, nationalities, and perspectives, reflecting the richness and diversity of this dynamic field. The collection explores key questions and debates in international legal theory, offers new intellectual histories for the discipline, and provides fresh interpretations of significant historical figures, texts, and theoretical approaches. It provides a much-needed map of the field of international legal theory, and a guide to the main themes and debates that have driven theoretical work in international law. The Handbook will be an indispensable reference work for students, scholars, and practitioners seeking to gain an overview of current theoretical debates about the nature, function, foundations, and future role of international law.

How ought scholars and students to approach the rapidly expanding and highly multidisciplinary study of international economic law? Academics in the field of international political economy used to take for granted that they worked with the overarching concepts of rules and governance, while legal scholars analyzed treaties and doctrines. However, over the past twenty years formerly disparate fields of study have converged in a complex terrain, where academic researchers and governmental policy analysts use a pluralistic set of theoretical and methodological tools to study the ongoing development of international economic law. This volume argues that the extensive development of international economic law makes it impossible to discuss international political economy and international law as if they were mutually exclusive processes, or even as if they were separate and mutually reinforcing. Rather, we must think of them as a deeply interconnected set of rapidly evolving activities. This is a paradigm shift in which we cease to think about an international system in which politics and law interact, and begin to think about an international system in which politics take place in a legal frame. Froese terms this a shift from politics and law, to the politics of international economic law. This book does for political economy what others have already done for law – introduces political scientists, economists, and other practitioners of IPE, to the potential of engaging with legal theory and method; it will be of great interest to scholars in a range of areas including IPE, global governance, IR and international law.

The ever-increasing exchange of goods and ideas among nations, as well as cross-border pollution, global warming, and international crime, pose urgent questions for international law. Here, two respected scholars provide an intellectual framework for assessing these pressing legal problems from a rational choice perspective. The approach assumes that states are rational, forward-looking agents which use international law to address the actions of other states that may have consequences for their own citizens, and to obtain the benefits of international cooperation. It further assumes that in the absence of a central enforcement agency—that is, a world government—international law must be self-enforcing. States must believe that if they violate international agreements, other states will retaliate. Consequently, Eric A. Posner and Alan O. Sykes devote considerable attention to the challenges of enforcing international law, which begin with the difficulties of determining what it is. In the absence of an international constitution, the sources for international law are vague. Lawyers must rely on statements contained in all manner of official documents and on simple observation of states’ behavior. This looseness leads international institutions such as the United Nations to deliver conflicting interpretations of the law’s most basic principles. The authors describe the conditions under which international law succeeds or fails, across a wide range of issues, including war crimes, human rights, international criminal law, principles of state responsibility, law of the sea, international trade regulation, and international investment law.

Since the beginnings of the GATT and the Bretton Woods institutions, and on to the creation of the WTO, states have continued to develop institutions and legal infrastructure to promote global interdependence. International lawyers are experts in understanding how these institutions operate in practice, but they tend to uncritically accept comparative advantage as the principal normative criterion to justify these institutions. In contrast, moral and political philosophers have developed accounts of global justice, but these accounts have had relatively little influence on international legal scholarship and on institutional design. This volume reflects the results of a symposium held at Tillar House, the American Society of International Law headquarters in Washington, DC, in November 2008, which brought together philosophers, legal scholars and economists to discuss the problems of understanding international economic law from the standpoints of rights and justice, in particular from the standpoint of distributive justice.

This book takes a fresh look at the most dynamic area of American law today, comprising the fields of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy, publicity rights, and misappropriation. Topics range from copyright in private letters to defensive patenting of business methods, from moral rights in the visual arts to the banking of trademarks, from the impact of the court of patent appeals to the management of Mickey Mouse. The history and political science of intellectual property law, the challenge of digitization, the many statutes and judge-made doctrines, and the interplay with antitrust principles are all examined. The treatment is both positive (oriented toward understanding the law as it is) and normative (oriented to the reform of the law). Previous analyses have tended to overlook the paradox that expanding intellectual property rights can effectively reduce the amount of new intellectual property by raising the creators' input costs. Those analyses have also failed to integrate the fields of intellectual property law. They have failed as well to integrate intellectual property law with the law of physical property, overlooking the many economic and legal-doctrinal parallels. This book demonstrates the fundamental economic rationality of intellectual property law, but is sympathetic to critics who believe that in recent decades Congress and the courts have gone too far in the creation and protection of intellectual property rights.

Analysing the emerging international legal framework governing financial institutions and markets, including monetary policies and monetary regulation, this book addresses the cross border issues that arise within this area. It highlights the lack of formal international law present, and shows how this contributed to the global financial crisis.

The state-centred 'Westphalian model' of international law has failed to protect human rights and other international public goods effectively. Most international trade, financial and environmental agreements do not even refer to human rights, consumer welfare, democratic citizen participation and transnational rule of law for the benefit of citizens. This book argues that these 'multilevel governance failures' are largely due to inadequate regulation of the 'collective action problems' in the supply of international public goods, such as inadequate legal, judicial and democratic accountability of governments vis-a-vis citizens. Rather than treating citizens as mere objects of intergovernmental economic and environmental regulation and leaving multilevel governance of international public goods to discretionary 'foreign policy', human rights and constitutional democracy call for 'civilizing' and 'constitutionalizing' international economic and environmental cooperation by stronger legal and judicial protection of citizens and their constitutional rights in international economic law. Moreover intergovernmental regulation of transnational cooperation among citizens must be justified by 'principles of justice' and 'multilevel constitutional restraints' protecting rights of citizens and their 'public reason'. The reality of 'constitutional pluralism' requires respecting legitimately diverse conceptions of human rights and democratic constitutionalism. The obvious failures in the governance of interrelated trading, financial and environmental systems must be restrained by cosmopolitan, constitutional conceptions of international law protecting the transnational rule of law and participatory democracy for the benefit of citizens.

Examines the WTO rules governing industrial subsidies, as established by the SCM Agreement and interpreted by relevant case law.