Suchergebnisse

AbstractRecent scholarship in law and society has engaged in novel ways with maritime spaces, articulating how they inform legal theory more broadly. This essay builds on such scholarship, and on a broad-brushed survey of maritime history, to make two basic arguments. First, a look at political and legal processes regarding maritime spaces reveals that law is transnational 'all the way down'. Legal theorists often assume that transnational legal processes are an added layer beyond domestic and international law. But the maritime perspective reveals that transnationalism comes first, both analytically and historically, as a constant negotiation of the relationship between what is 'inside' and what is 'outside' a polity. Second, the maritime space begins, at least in dominant legal traditions, as an absolute exteriority – imagined as outside or beyond polities and jurisdictions. But with the climate crisis and the emergence of the Anthropocene we may observe an inversion, the sea now appears as a record of harmful human activity; a mirror showing a troublesome collective portrait of humanity. The inversion from a maritime exteriority to the intimacy of ubiquitous environmental harm defines the parameters of law and politics today. The essay concludes with reflections on how the maritime perspective may best be engaged today in responding to that image through political action. It conceptualizes what I call the 'commonist lifeboat' – a model of bottom-up universalism for tumultuous times.

Abstract
Contemporary Palestinian asylum seekers raise fundamental questions regarding the relationship between the institution of asylum and struggles for national liberation. Underlying the legal framework that applies to them is an assumption of inverse correlation: the more Palestinians obtain access to individual asylum claims, the less secure are the fundamental Palestinian claims of self-determination and return. But is this trade-off acceptable today? Comparable dilemmas animate other large-scale displacements, but scholars seldom discuss their full implications for international legal theory. Rather than providing a definite answer to the question, this article maps out four major aspects of how individual protection and self-determination are interrelated, or, indeed, bifurcated, in international law. The new Palestinian refugees are important to consider not only because their continued displacement is foreseeable but also because their exceptional plight invites a reconsideration of the political foundations of refugee law. How can policy makers and legal interpreters uphold principles of both individual and collective protection, preventing the two from cutting against each other?

Abstract
A great work of literature does more for international criminal justice than providing evidence. By couching the evidence in conceptual categories, literature can offer insights on how law should be interpreted. This review essay seeks to demonstrate this argument about legal interpretation through a reading of Behrouz Boochani's much-acclaimed No Friend but the Mountains. In doing so, it seeks to offer a reflection on the significance of literary evidence authored by those subjected to atrocity. Boochani is far from being the first author whose work has enormous value both as literature and as testimony (an overlap that has been widely studied in the humanities and social sciences). Yet the relationship between the two is still seldom appreciated by lawyers and seldom appreciated for its value to legal theory. The essay aims to contribute to the latter discussion, specifically as it pertains to contemporary abuses against asylum seekers.

It is a tremendous honor being here today and participating in this esteemed panel on the "Law (and Politics) of Displacement," which Jill Goldenziel has organized. I would like to share some research Umut Özsu and I are working on. This is a work in progress, but I still think its outlines are worth discussion, by way of historical background. I hope the project also demonstrates quite well why several of us at the International Migration Law Interest Group at the American Society of International Law have been thinking that migration should become more central to the discipline of international law; as central, say, as international humanitarian law.