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In a landmark decision, on December 21, 2011, the Court of Justice upheld the extension to international aviation activities of the greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme (ETS) of the European Union (Union or EU) against a challenge that it violates several treaties and principles of customary international law. In addition to its broader significance in the context of global versus unilateral approaches to tackling climate change, and its related role in fueling a major international trade dispute, the ruling pronounces on important aspects of international aviation law and clarifies the principles governing conformity of EU internal legislation with international law.

For the first time since the Corfu Channel case of 1949, the International Court of Justice (Court) has awarded damages. The Court did so on June 19, 2012, in its third judgment in the Diallo case, brought by the Republic of Guinea for human rights violations committed against a Guinean citizen by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The judgment was also the Court's first on damages in a human rights case.

When the skin of an Australian platypus was first taken to England in the 1700s, scientists thought it was a fake. It looked like someone had sewn a duck's bill onto a beaver's body; one scientist even took a pair of scissors to the skin looking for stitches. The animal had fur and was warm-blooded like a mammal, yet laid eggs and had webbed feet like a bird or a reptile. Scientists struggled to categorize this unusual creature. Was it a bird, a mammal, or a reptile? Or was it some strange hybrid of all three?

Since the close of the Cold War, the international community has created a variety of legal institutions designed to step in when state justice systems fail to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The ad hoc criminal tribunals, the hybrid tribunals (such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the use of universal jurisdiction by national courts are among a new generation of courtly mechanisms designed to hold wrongdoers criminally accountable, state justice systems notwithstanding. These mechanisms represent an era of international judicial involvement in what used to be a more exclusively sovereign matter—the response to mass crimes against civilian populations. Accordingly, they have engendered a slew of scholarship devoted to analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, individually and as a group.

There has been an ongoing debate over recent years about the scope of a state's right of selfdefense against an imminent or actual armed attack by nonstate actors. The debate predates the Al Qaeda attacks against the World Trade Center and elsewhere in the United States on September 11,2001, but those events sharpened its focus and gave it greater operational urgency. While an important strand of the debate has taken place in academic journals and public forums, there has been another strand, largely away from the public gaze, within governments and between them, about what the appropriate principles are, and ought to be, in respect of such conduct. Insofar as these discussions have informed the practice of states and their appreciations of legality, they carry particular weight, being material both to the crystallization and development of customary international law and to the interpretation of treaties.