Suchergebnisse

The international legal scholarship, in its quest for a paradigm able to apprehend international norm-generating processes qualifying as lawmaking, has been oscillating between static approaches and dynamic approaches. The former are based on the author of the norm (subjecthood) or its formal origin (pedigree) whilst the latter (e.g., participation) try to capture and explain the intricate and multidimensional fluxes between the authors of the norms and the norms themselves (impact or dynamic pedigree). International legal scholars have thus been resorting to various and diverging paradigms to make sense of international lawmaking. All of these approaches will be described in further detail below. This Article endeavors to shed some light on the reasons guiding scholars to choose one of these paradigms. After a brief outline of the mainstream empirical construction of current norm-generating processes in international law and a further detailed description of the main cognitive choices found in international legal scholarship, this Article elaborates on the driving forces behind each of the main paradigms permeating contemporary literature on international lawmaking. In doing so, this Article draws attention to the politics of empiricism and cognition with the aim of engaging in critical self-reflection on how international legal scholars and practitioners have been making sense of international lawmaking.

There exists a range of situations where non-state actors and states can possibly share responsibility for their contribution to harmful outcomes, thereby raising a multitude of questions on the determination, content and implementation of responsibility in such a scenario. It may be tempting to adopt an approach whereby a shared responsibility regime involving non-state actors and states draws ex post on the regime put in place by the ILC Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, especially in connection to the rules of attribution of conduct and attribution of responsibility. Such a model of international responsibility, however, would only work to the extent that addressees are bound by primary norms of international law in the first place. This is certainly not a given in respect of non-state actors. Moreover, non-state actors may differ fundamentally from states, thereby making the transposition of traditional rules of state responsibility artificial and inadequate: their loosely organised, temporary, diverse, illegitimate, or even outright criminal character may militate against applying the classic responsibility paradigm to non-state-state interactions. In view of these limitations, a turn to an ex ante approach to questions of shared responsibility, through standard-setting, has been suggested, and may be cautiously supported in respect of the activities of a number of non-state actors. This, however, is not exclusive to the simultaneous application of ex post and ex ante approaches to shared responsibility.