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This open access book brings conceptual clarity to the study and practice of self-determination, showing that it is, without doubt, one of the most important concepts of the international legal order. It argues that the accepted categorisation of internal and external self-determination is not helpful, and suggests a new typology. This new framework has four categories: the polity-based, secessionary, colonial, and remedial forms. Each will be distinguished by the grounds, or the legitimacy-claim, on which it is based. This not only ensures consistency, it moves the question out of the purely conceptual realm and addresses the practical concerns of those invoking self-determination. By presenting international lawyers with a typology that is both theoretically consistent and more practically useful, the author makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this keystone of international law. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht.

Abstract
In Monetary Gold Removed from Rome, the International Court of Justice first articulated the "Monetary Gold rule": the principle that it cannot rule on cases in which the conduct of a State not party to the proceedings forms the "very subject-matter" of the dispute. That principle is taken to be a fundamental rule of international law, deriving its force from the sovereignty of States and the nature of the international legal system.
This article will dispute that claim, and will argue that the principle of consent underpinning Monetary Gold is an empty formalism. Through a comparison of the Court's approach in its contentious and advisory jurisdictions, it will ask to what States consent and for what purpose they do so, when they "consent to jurisdiction", and no satisfactory answer will be found. It will conclude that the focus on consent in international adjudication is discretionary.

International law has a self-determination problem. The paradoxes raised by the concept, almost like a Russian doll, beget ever more paradoxes. Yet, when pressed for clarity as to its scope, scholars, practitioners, and legal advisers all shy away from precise definitions. Based on the apparent collision of competing claims, self-determination is reduced to a claim to create a new State; territorial integrity is viewed as a necessary protection for existing political units. A neat binary is constructed whereby self-determination is reduced to instances where it does not affect territorial integrity (so-called 'internal self-determination') and those where it disrupts it significantly ('external self-determination'). The self-determination/territorial integrity binary, though taught widely in international law textbooks, doctrine, and practice, is deceptively simple and fails to tell the whole story; it is for this reason that we propose a different way of conceptualising self-determination claims in international law. In this piece, we will develop an argument that the concept of self-determination is in fact a category, a genus, of which there exist four distinct forms, or species: polity-based; identitarian; remedial; and colonial. We argue that by rethinking self-determination in this manner, the common features of these four forms help us further to give content to the concept, as well as better to understand the different legal treatment that self-determination claims have received within international law.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge, with governments resorting to different legal strategies to respond to the health emergency. This article offers a cross-cuting comparative analysis of measures taken during first six months of the pandemic (the "first wave") in four European jurisdictions with significantly different constitutional settlements – namely France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. It explores the influence of specific constitutional features on the legal responses to the pandemic and how, in turn, these responses have the potential to reconfigure the institutional frameworks in place. The inquiry, which unfolds along the analytical categories of (i) legal basis, (ii) horizontal and (iii) vertical allocation of power, and (iv) the role of the judiciary, shows that both constitutional contexts and legal traditions play a significant role in pandemic times and are, moreover, likely to continue shaping post-pandemic governance patterns.

The World Lawyers' Pledge on Climate Action is an open letter from and to the global legal community, calling for the mainstreaming of climate concerns throughout the law and legal profession. It seeks to rethink and redefine the role and responsibilities of lawyers in the climate crisis, and invites lawyers of all kinds —including practitioners, judges, scholars, civil servants, law students, and lawmakers—to integrate climate concerns into their respective areas of expertise and work. The magnitude and urgency of the climate crisis require all lawyers, not just environmental lawyers, to be part of the solution and contribute to climate-protective legal development. The Pledge can be endorsed and signed at http://www.lawyersclimatepledge.org.