Upcoming Events

IILJ Colloquium Spring 2014 Public sessions with scholars on ICL, human trafficking, regulatory arbitrage, conflicts of laws, development law, and immunities.

Law and Global Governance of Development -- Call for Papers For 10th Viterbo GAL Seminar, June 12-13, 2014.

Recent Events

International Law and Human Rights Emerging Scholarship Conference, March 27-29

A Conversation with the UN's Legal Counsel Wednesday, Mar. 26th, 7-8:15pm, Vanderbilt Hall 204

September 30, 2013 The Cholera Epidemic in Haiti:
Questions of UN Accountability and Prevention, Detailed program and video here.

All event items on our Events Page

News

Thomas Earnest's paper “Constraining the Executive in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance: Comparative Considerations for U.S. Bulk Collection Programs,” will be published in January 2015's edition of the Stanford Journal of International Law.

Professor Eberhard Schmidt-Aßmann, a celebrated expert in German administrative law, will be a Senior Visiting Scholar with IILJ this spring.

Julian Arato's article, Subsequent Practice and Evolutive Interpretation: Techniques of Treaty Interpretation Over Time and Their Diverse Consequences was recently cited by the High Court of Australia in Maloney v. The Queen.

Sally E. Merry's Research on using human rights indicators effectively has been highlighted on NSF's SEE innovation website (posted here)

Professors Benedict Kingsbury and Kevin E. Davis reflect on Olympic Medal tables in the Wall Street Journal (in print here and on WSJ blog here)

IILJ launches new Law and Global Governance book series with Oxford University Press. Edited by Andrew Hurrell of Oxford Univeristy and Benedict Kingsbury and Richard Stewart of NYU, the series publishes robust original work on new approaches to law and regulation, with emphasis on issues and ideas in developing countries. The first volume is Governance by Indicators: Global Power through Quantification and Rankings.

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Welcome to the IILJ website

This site brings together the research, scholarship, teaching, and outreach activities of New York University School of Law's acclaimed international law program.

IILJ Academic and Policy Work

Global Administrative Law Project

Global Administrative Law is a path-breaking approach to participation, transparency, accountability and review in global governance. The Project homepage provides details on all GAL project events, links to full-text articles, bibliography, working papers series and blog.

全球行政法项目中文网页(Chinese)

New: GAL Network page

Inter-Institutional Relations Project

This project focuses on interactions between institutions in the global administrative space. At the outset, the project aims to capture five types of institutional interaction: interactions between institutions that are international actors (horizontal); interactions between international and national institution, where the latter is a member of the international body (vertical); interactions between an international institution and a national one where the national body is not a member (diagonal); interactions between institutions from different countries; and relationships between different national institutions in the same country. Following these five dimensions, several questions about institutional interaction can be asked, including, in particular, questions about: management of interactions, the relationship between interaction and institutional change, the effects of interaction, and the consequences of interaction for law.

Recent Events

Workshop on Technologies and Effects of Inter-Institutional Interaction, April 9, 2013.

Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, Boston MA Panel on Global Private Governance: Power and Norm Generation in Inter-Institutional Relations and the Panel on Inter-Institutional Evaluation through the Use of Indicators. May 30-31, 2013.

Indicators as a Global Technology/Governance by Information Project

This project, led by Professors Davis, Kingsbury, and Merry, addresses global and local exercises of power through Governance by Information. Public and private sector indicators/rankings are increasingly used as instruments of governance: determining credit ratings of countries, the meaning of clauses in human rights treaties, the allocation of development funding, compliance with prohibitions on human trafficking. Local NGOs produce indicators to advocate reform. In this NSF-funded project a world-wide network of scholars, including many current and former NYU students, are mapping and explaining this form of governance, and analyzing impact in numerous developing countries.

Financing Development Program

Access to financial capital can be a crucial determinant of countries’ prospects for development. The sources of financing available to inhabitants of developing countries, the terms upon which financing is provided and the kinds of projects being financed have become increasingly varied, but very restricted since the 2008-09 credit crisis. The research program on financing development maps this changing legal order, its social and economic implications, and the scope for innovation.

Recent Events

Innovation in Governance of Development Finance: Causes, Consequences and the Role of Law. Detailed program here. NEW! Video here. Conference Report here.

Investment Law Project

The Investment Law Forum is devoted to the rigorous and critical examination of the increasing jurisprudence that is emerging from investor-state arbitral tribunals, as well as the underlying legal norms, whether in bilateral investment treaties or bilateral or regional trade agreements, that these tribunals are applying. The tribunal awards in investor-state arbitration raise important thematic issues, such as canons of treaty interpretation, the nature of state responsibility including remedies, custom as a source of law, and "fragmentation"-the relationship of investment law to other international legal regimes, whether the WTO or environment or human rights. Through anchoring reflection on these and other fundamental themes in the case law and related legal developments, we seek to engage the relevant academic community but also practitioners, policymakers, and activists.

Program in the History and Theory of International Law

This Program encourages scholarship and teaching on topics in the history and theory of international law that are vital to deepening an understanding of the field. The premise of the Program is that the future development of international law depends on sustained theoretical work, including careful historical study, and that collective efforts are needed to enhance worldwide research and teaching in these areas. The Program holds periodic conferences and workshops, sponsors a refereed working paper series, hosts visiting fellows (including faculty from other disciplines, and post-docs), supports research and publications, provides a center bringing together people interested in these fields, and each year offers a set of courses in these areas at the Law School.

Global Climate Finance Project

This project examines the design of climate finance mechanisms, as well as the institutions and governance mechanisms required to ensure that the decentralized climate finance system functions effectively. It draws on the expertise of NYU Law faculty in climate change, environmental law, development finance, international trade and investment, international transaction taxation and tax policy generally, global institutions, and global regulatory governance. It is closely linked to both the IILJ's Global Administrative Law project and the IILJ Financing Development program.

International Law and International Organizations: the United Nations and International Financial Institutions

The IILJ integrates the Law School’s scholarly excellence in international law into the policy activities of the United Nations. Issues examined by the IILJ include the administrative tribunals and the UN, role of the Security Council in strengthening a rules-based international system (jointly with the Permanent Mission of Austria to the UN), the role of the UN Secretary-General in World Politics, and state-building, governance and accountability in United Nations law.

Private and Transactional International Law

NYU School of Law provides a rich academic environment for the study of private and transactional international law. The Law School offers a diverse array of courses, special internship opportunities, and extra-curricular activities designed to provide students with a solid foundation upon which to develop careers in the fields of private and transactional international law – in an academic, governmental, inter-governmental, or professional setting.

Prior Projects:

Private Military and Security Companies

Publications

New:

Indicators as a Technology of Global Governance. Kevin E. Davis, Benedict Kingsbury and Sally Engle Merry, Law and Society Review vol. 46, issue 1, March 2012.

Indicators as Interventions: Pitfalls and Prospects in Supporting Development Initiatives. Kevin E. Davis and Benedict Kingsbury, Rockefeller Foundation, December 2011.

Measuring the World: Indicators, Human Rights, and Global Governance. Sally Engle Merry, Current Anthropology Volume 52, Supplement 3, April 2011.

The Wars of the Romans: A Critical Edition and Translation of De Armis Romanis, Alberico Gentili. Benedict Kingsbury, Benjamin Straumann (eds.), David Lupher (trans.), Oxford University Press, 2011. Review by: David J. Bederman.

The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire. Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2010. Review by: David J. Bederman. Review by Christopher Smith.

Global Administrative Law: The Casebook (3rd ed.) Edited by S. Cassese, B. Carotti, L. Casini, E. Cavalieri, and E. MacDonald.

The Montreal Protocol in U.S. Domestic Law: A "Bottom Up" Approach to the Development of Global Administrative Law. Elspeth Fairman Hans

International Law and Justice Working Papers

Working Paper 2013/1: Grainne De Burca, Robert O. Keohane, and Charles Sabel, New Modes of Pluralist Global Governance

Working Paper 2013/2: Kenneth W. Abbott, Jessica F. Green, and Robert O. Keohane, Organizational Ecology and Organizational Strategies in World Politics

Working Paper 2013/3: Richard B. Stewart, Michael Oppenheimer, and Bryce Rudyk, Building Blocks for Global Climate Protection

Working Paper 2013/4: Alan Sykes, An Economic Perspective on As Such/Facial versus As Applied Challenges in the WTO and U.S. Constitutional Systems

Working Paper 2013/5: Robert W. Staiger & Alan Sykes, Non-Violations

Working Paper 2013/6: Robert W. Staiger & Alan Sykes, How Important can the Non-Violation Clause be for the ATT/WTO?

IILJ Project Books

Governance by Indicators: Global Power through Quantification and Rankings. Kevin Davis, Angelina Fisher, Benedict Kingsbury and Sally Engle Merry (eds.), Oxford University Press (2012).

Essays presented at the 2009 Symposium on Global Administrative Law in the Operations of International Organizations, Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, Lorenzo Casini, and Benedict Kingsbury (eds.)
International Organizations Law Review (Vol. 6, no. 2, 2009).

Climate Finance: Regulatory and Funding Strategies for Climate Change and Global Development, Richard B. Stewart, Benedict Kingsbury and Bryce Rudyk (eds.), NYU Press (2009).

Benedict Kingsbury [et. al.], El nuevo derecho administrativo global en América Latina, Rap (2009).

Simon Chesterman and Angelina Fisher, (eds.), Private Security, Public Order: The Outsourcing of Public Services and its Limits, Oxford University Press, (2009).