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International Law in the U.S. Legal System provides a wide-ranging overview of how all the major forms of international law operate within the United States and addresses many areas of controversy, including the authority of the President to withdraw the United States from international agreements, the role of international law in the war on terrorism, the proper scope of international human rights litigation, and the relevance of international law to capital punishment.

Comparative foreign relations law compares and contrasts how nations, and also supranational entities such as the European Union, structure their decisions about matters such as entering into and exiting from international agreements, engaging with international institutions, and using military force, as well as how they incorporate treaties and customary international law into their domestic legal systems. The book consists of forty-six chapters, written by leading authors from around the world. Some of the chapters are empirically focused, others are theoretical, and still others contain in-depth case studies.

This 46-chapter book, written by leading experts across the globe, compares and contrasts the foreign relations law of nations around the world, both documenting important differences and also noting commonalities and emerging trends. Comparative foreign relations law is a newly emerging field of study and teaching, and this volume is likely to become a key reference work as the field continues to develop.

Although customary international law has long been an important source of rights and obligations in international relations, there has been extensive debate in recent years about whether this body of law is equipped to address complex modern problems such as climate change, international terrorism, and global financial instability. In addition, there is growing uncertainty about how, precisely, international and domestic courts should identify rules of customary international law. Custom's Future seeks to address this uncertainty by providing a better understanding of how customary international law has developed over time, the way in which it is applied in practice, and the challenges that it faces going forward. Reflecting an interdisciplinary mix of historical, empirical, economic, philosophical, and doctrinal analysis, and containing chapters by leading international law experts, it will be of use to lawyers, judges, and researchers alike

Congress recently enacted significant reforms to the laws governing the reporting and publication of international agreements in the United States. These reforms were adopted in December 2022 and took effect in September 2023, and the State Department issued regulations implementing them in early October 2023.

AbstractThe text of the US Constitution appears to require that individual states, to the extent that they are ever allowed to conclude agreements with foreign governments, must obtain congressional approval. In practice, however, states conclude many agreements with foreign governments, including with Canada and its provinces, and they almost never seek congressional approval. This practice is an illustration of both the importance of federalism in US foreign relations and the significant role played by historical practice in informing US constitutional interpretation. The phenomenon of state international agreements assumed new prominence in 2019 when the Trump administration sued to challenge a climate change agreement that the state of California had made with Québec. Despite this challenge, for the most part, neither Congress nor the executive branch has resisted the growth in state international agreements. This acquiescence could change as countries like China target US states in an effort to work around strained relations with the US national government and as states become more assertive in resisting the national government's foreign policies. In any event, the practice of state international agreements unapproved by Congress rests in part on a distinction between binding and non-binding agreements that deserves greater scrutiny under both domestic and international law.

AbstractFor more than a decade, U.S. courts have struggled to develop a common law immunity regime to govern suits brought against foreign government officials, and they are now divided on a number of issues, including the extent to which they should defer to the executive branch and whether to recognize a jus cogens exception. This Editorial Comment considers a more conceptual division in the courts, between an "effect-of-judgment" approach that would confer immunity only when the judgment that the plaintiff is seeking would be directly enforceable against the foreign state, and a broader "nature-of-act" approach that would confer immunity whenever the plaintiff's case is challenging conduct carried out on behalf of the state. The Comment argues in favor of the nature-of-act approach and explains why analogies in this context to domestic civil rights litigation are misplaced.