Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The normally challenging task of teaching international law is amplified when teaching international law in jurisdictions that face ongoing human rights problems and other failures of compliance with international law. In those jurisdictions, the dialectics between the globalized world economy and technology on the one hand and the intensification of hostility to human rights and substantive democracies (ie to the values of public international law) on the other hand are much more pronounced. Students will often resist international law and regard it as the 'enemy of the state' or a source of illegitimate foreign influence. The challenge of international law teachers in those jurisdictions is thus not only to teach international law but also to draw the students into – rather than alienate them from – thinking about their resistance to international law and about the relations between law, power and legitimacy. How to meet this and related challenges is the focus of this paper, which is based on the authors' practical experiences of teaching international law in several jurisdictions with an international law crisis including Hong Kong, Israel, and the People's Republic of China.

It has been said that consent is the cornerstone of international law. Even if, strictly speaking, the progression of international lawmaking has taken us beyond that view on matters of substance, surely the proposition maintains traction on matters of jurisdiction. The increase in international treaties conferring courts and tribunals with competence to resolve disputes has tied many states to the mast, but, like Odysseus, we must remember that the origin of that conferral is consent.

When, on October 24, 1983, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California handed down its decision in Timberlane Lumber Co. v. Bank of America and denied U.S. jurisdiction out of regard for the Honduran "system of justice," there may have been some surprise that the case was still pending. The Timberlane decision of 1976 of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which remanded the matter to the district court, had already become a classic, even though it was preceded by the 1968 decision in United States v. First National City Bank on the production of documents located abroad. The Timberlane approach outlined by Judge Choy, under which the exercise of antitrust jurisdiction has to be restrained by a case-by-case analysis of various factors, was widely discussed (and usually praised) in legal writing, and was also followed by federal courts of the Second, Third, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Circuits.