In this new volume in the Elements series, Daniel D. Bradlow traces the history and development of international law and international financial institutions from 1918 to today, providing a detailed overview of the legal frameworks within which such institutions were established and operate, and which structure their relationships with their member states and their citizens. The book opens with the inter-war years, the Bretton Woods Conference, and background on the treaties establishing the IMF and the World Bank. It then discusses the Articles of Agreement of the IMF and the IBRD, providing information on their governance arrangements, mandates, and operating principles. The international legal status of these two international financial institutions, their international legal rights, responsibilities and obligations, and their privileges and immunities are also examined. In later chapters, the book explores how the structure, functions, and operations of the World Bank and IMF have evolved since their establishment and examines the regional development banks and the regional financial arrangements that were created after them. The book concludes by exploring the challenges that international financial institutions are currently facing, and the contributions that international law can make to help them successfully meet these challenges.

The fundamental recognition in this book is that the issue of what international legal principles are applicable to the operations of the IFIs is an important topic that would benefit from more rigorous study. Twelve deeply committed contributors - whose work spans the academic, policy, and activist spectrum - suggest that a better understanding of these legal issues could help both the organizations and their Member States structure their transactions in ways that are more compatible with their developmental objectives and their international responsibilities.

SCOTT (copy 1): From the John Holmes Library collection.

The first casebook of its kind, Judicial Decisions on the Law of International Organizations contains relevant excerpts of leading court opinions and decisions on the law of international organizations (international institutional law) and critical commentaries written by leading experts in the field.

The book analyses how international law addresses interactions between international organizations. In labour governance, these interactions are ubiquitous. They offer each organization an opportunity to promote its model of labour governance, yet simultaneously expose it to adverse influence from others. The book captures this ambivalence and examines the capacity of international law to mitigate it. Based on detailed case studies of mutual influence between the International Labour Organization, the World Bank, and the Council of Europe, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the pertinent law and its key challenges, both at institutional and inter-organizational level. The author envisions a law of inter-organizational interactions as a normative framework structuring interactions and enhancing the effectiveness and legitimacy of multi-institutional governance.

This book focuses on the legal challenges and opportunities for International Financial Institutions in the post-crisis world. It includes contributions from academics, practitioners and Bank staff. The contributions cover a broad array of issues, included governance reform and constitutional framework of IFIs, privileges and immunities, responsibility of international organizations, issues related to fragile and conflict-affected states, climate finance, and the recent financial crisis. The book is organized in three main areas, namely (i) Law of International Organizations: Issues Confronting IFIs; (ii) Legal Obligations and Institutions of Developing Countries: Rethinking Approaches of IFIs; and (iii) International Finance and the Challenges of Regulatory Governance.

There can be little doubt that a group of prominent and influential organizations lie at the heart of international economic law (IEL). These include the Bretton Woods institutions, regional development banks and economic organizations, and various specialized global institutions primarily active in norm generation. This volume possesses the unique distinction of presenting the perspectives – both institutional and personal – of legal counsels in some key international economic organizations regarding their work and the role of law within the framework of their organizations, with particular attention to the conditions within which they can optimally contribute to the development of IEL. This last consideration is emphasized in three ‘external’ academic perspectives that focus mainly on what the role of counsels in international economic organizations ought to be. Each first-hand perspective focuses on counsel’s involvement in such aspects of IEL as the following: providing internal advice on the law of the organization; assisting members with respect to domestic institutions and law in the economic sphere; to what extent (if any) legal counsels are normally involved in policy making for issues that are not strictly of a legal nature; intellectual contributions both to the development of international law and the dissemination and exchange of legal knowledge among various stakeholders; ethical challenges and response to possible conflicts of interests; generation of soft law economic instruments; legal issues on replenishment of resources for development funding; setting of internationally recognized standards or best practices for commercial and financial legislation; informal networks of lawyers and lawyer functions which cut across institutional and territorial boundaries; and negotiation and management of free trade agreements from a legal perspective.

At the beginning of the nineties, there was an expectation within the human rights community that the next decade would be a period of consolidation for the international human rights regime. This did not happen. In fact, the human rights regime underwent dramatic changes in response to new circumstances. We have tried to highlight both the achievements and the challenges ahead in this Manual, the result of a joint project under the auspices of HumanitarianNet, a Thematic Network on Humanitarian Development Studies leaded by the University of Deusto (Bilbao, the Basque Country, Spain), and the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation (EIUC, Venice, Italy).

The World Bank's Lawyers provides an original socio-legal account of the evolving institutional life of international law. Informed by oral archives, months of participant observation, interviews, legal memoranda, and documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests, it tells a previously untold story of the World Bank's legal department between 1983 and 2016. This is a story of people and the beliefs they have, the influence they seek, and the tools they employ. It is an account of the practices they cling to and how these practices gain traction, or how they fail to do so, in an international bureaucracy. Inspired by actor-network theory, relational sociologies of association, and performativity theory, this ethnographic exploration multiplies the matters of concern in our study of international law (and lawyering): the human and non-human, material and semantic, visible and evasive actants that tie together the fragile fabric of legality. In tracing these threads, this book signals important changes in the conceptual repertoire and materiality of international legal practice, as liberal ideals were gradually displaced by managerial modes of evaluation. It reveals a world teeming with life—a space where professional postures and prototypes, aesthetic styles, and technical routines are woven together in law's shifting mode of existence. This history of international law as a contingent cultural technique enriches our understanding of the discipline's disenchantment and the displacement of its traditional tropes by unexpected and unruly actors. It thereby inspires new ways of critical thinking about international law's political pathways, promises, and pathologies, as its language is inscribed in ever-evolving rationalities of rule.

Explores criteria determining the international responsibility of member states for failure to protect human rights in international financial institutions.