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This article raises the intriguing claim that international law can be overlegalized. Overlegalization occurs where a treaty's substantive rules or its review procedures are too constraining of sovereignty, causing governments to engage in acts of non-compliance or even to denounce the treaty. The concept of legalization and its potential excesses, although unfamiliar to many legal scholars, has begun to be explored by international relations theorists analyzing the effects of legal rules in changing state behavior. This article bridges the gap between international legal scholarship and international relations theory by exploring a recent case study of overlegalization. It seeks to understand why, in the late 1990s, three Commonwealth Caribbean governments denounced human rights treaties and withdrew from the jurisdiction of international tribunals. I refer to these events as the Caribbean backlash against human rights regimes. My study of this backlash has two objectives. The first is to show how overlegalizing human rights can lead even liberal democracies to reconsider their commitment to international institutions that protect those rights. The second objective is to assess three competing international relations theories that seek to explain the conditions under which states comply with their treaty commitments. To provide a more persuasive analysis of these issues, the article includes empirical data analyzing changes in the filing and review of international human rights petitions against Caribbean governments during the 1990s.

This article analyzes the dispute settlement proceedings pending before the World Trade Organization (WTO) concerning the Fairness in Music License Act of 1998, a new provision of the US Copyright Act that exempts many bars, restaurants, and retail stores from paying license fees for performing broadcast music in their establishments. In May 1999, the European Community challenged the Act, and its predecessor "homestyle exemption," as a violation of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) and the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Berne). The FMLA dispute is the first time in history that US copyright laws will be judged by an international tribunal. The case is an embarrassing one for the United States, which has recently pursued a policy of aggressively encouraging other nations to provide strong legal protections for copyrighted works. Although officials within the Clinton Administration warned legislators that the Fairness in Music Licensing Act might be incompatible with the Berne and TRIPs treaties, Congress enacted the statute over their objections. Thus, in the first year of the new century, Congress may be faced with an unprecedented choice: modify the Copyright Act to satisfy the demands of international trade jurists or face retaliatory trade sanctions by the EC. In addition to analyzing the legal arguments available to the US and the EC under the Berne and TRIPs treaties, this article also seeks to explain why Congress deliberately chose to ignore past US intellectual property policy. Using insights from law and economics and from a study of the history of laws and licensing practices governing secondary uses of broadcast music, the article demonstrates how an increasingly broad free use exemption developed for businesses playing radio and television music. It then draws on these economic and historical insights to develop legislative reform proposals that are both compatible with United States' treaty obligations and that encourage performance rights organizations and associations of copyright users to reach an efficient private agreement to resolve the WTO dispute.

Do international court judgments influence the behavior of actors other than the parties to a dispute? Are international courts agents of policy change or do their judgments merely reflect evolving social and political trends? We develop a theory that specifies the conditions under which international courts can use their interpretive discretion to have system-wide effects. We examine the theory in the context of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues by creating a new data set that matches these rulings with laws in all Council of Europe (CoE) member states. We also collect data on LGBT policies unaffected by ECtHR judgments to control for the confounding effect of evolving trends in national policies. We find that ECtHR judgments against one country substantially increase the probability of national-level policy change across Europe. The marginal effects of the judgments are especially high where public acceptance of sexual minorities is low, but where national courts can rely on ECtHR precedents to invalidate domestic laws or where the government in power is not ideologically opposed to LGBT equality. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for other international courts. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractDo international court judgments influence the behavior of actors other than the parties to a dispute? Are international courts agents of policy change or do their judgments merely reflect evolving social and political trends? We develop a theory that specifies the conditions under which international courts can use their interpretive discretion to have system-wide effects. We examine the theory in the context of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues by creating a new data set that matches these rulings with laws in all Council of Europe (CoE) member states. We also collect data on LGBT policies unaffected by ECtHR judgments to control for the confounding effect of evolving trends in national policies. We find that ECtHR judgments against one country substantially increase the probability of national-level policy change across Europe. The marginal effects of the judgments are especially high where public acceptance of sexual minorities is low, but where national courts can rely on ECtHR precedents to invalidate domestic laws or where the government in power is not ideologically opposed to LGBT equality. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for other international courts.