By: Joshua Hiero PDF: Guns for Hire Modern Private Military Companies (PMCs) possess the tools and capabilities of full-fledged militaries, while using the corporate form to obtain financing, avoid legal accountability, and shield their true identities. These PMCs have increasingly been operating in weak states where they act with impunity knowing that they are beyond the reach of the law. This Note will demonstrate the difficulties of keeping PMCs accountable in active conf

By: Jake Goodman-Palmer PDF: Manufacturing Accountability This Article examines four avenues for holding multinational corporations (MNCs) accountable for workplace injuries that occur in their value chains and proposes a fifth solution. The four pathways are: human rights tribunals, the self- regulation of firm activity through the promulgation of private standards, tort or delict liability in domestic courts, and a novel proposal to establish an International Court of Civi

By: Andrew Wickes PDF: Can A UN Protectorate Provide Resolution? Haiti remains an unstable nation despite multiple transnational interventions in the last thirty years. After overthrowing the French in 1804, Haiti has vacillated between periods of independence and subservience to foreign nations. Political instability and harsh poverty implored the UN to begin a series of peacekeeping missions to help stabilize the nation around the turn of the twenty-first century. Politica

By: Erick Guapizaca Jiménez PDF: Pre-Legislative Indigenous Consultation This Article seeks to distinguish pre-legislative and pre-regulatory consultation (together referred to as pre-legislative consultation) from project-based consultation. Pre-legislative consultation covers draft legislation, executive orders, and regulations that create general norms and is triggered when a measure directly affects Indigenous Peoples. This Article makes two claims. First, pre-legislativ

By: Emily M. Broad Leib & Noelle Musolino PDF: From Surplus to Sustenance The right to food has been acknowledged as a key part of the global human rights framework, officially recognized by 171 countries. Even in countries that have not formally recognized the right—notably including the United States—there is general agreement that government plays an important role in ensuring food security. Recent global shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine conflic

By: Connor Stevens PDF: Uncharted Waters As global temperatures continue to rise, states are not on track to achieve net-zero carbon emission goals, as embodied in the Paris Agreement. Countries are beginning to research ocean carbon dioxide removal, such as macroalgae cultivation, iron fertilization and other geoengineering techniques, to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Implementation in the high seas would help drive removal efforts to the scale nations n

By: Tarissa L. Peterson PDF: Voyage of Injustice Behind the glamour of the cruise ship industry lies a dark reality of systemic exploitation that requires public awareness and urgent action to facilitate reform. This Article unveils the dark side of the cruise ship industry and whether the existing international legal architecture enables exploitation in the cruise ship industry, and the pathways forward for reform. This Article delves into the cruise ship industry’s employ

By: Mia Mahmudur Rahim PDF: Monopolizing The Harvest This Article critically examines the growing dominance of multinational corporations in the global seed and agrochemical sectors and their far-reaching implications for food security, agricultural biodiversity, and environmental sustainability. Through a detailed analysis of market consolidation, intellectual property regimes, and technological dependencies, this Article reveals how a handful of corporations have come to c

By: Ines Willemyns PDF: The Future of Crypto Crypto assets (sometimes referred to as cryptocurrencies) were created shortly after the 2008 financial crisis to provide an alternative financial system that was completely decentralized, trustless, and did not require any regulatory oversight. Since their inception, crypto assets have been plagued by violent value fluctuations and instances of severe negligence and fraud, causing billions of dollars in losses for investors every

By: Caitlin Sharma PDF: A Dose of Accountability The international fentanyl crisis underscores significant gaps in treaty enforcement, particularly with state accountability for drug manufacturing and export practices leading to illicit fentanyl trafficking. Despite preventive measures established by United Nations drug conventions, legal loopholes in these provisions impede meaningful cooperation between state parties. This Note uses key countries, including the United Stat

By: Brook Whitley PDF: A Beacon of Service Recent high profile human trafficking cases—particularly trafficking for sexual exploitation—have highlighted shortcomings in international human rights law. Human trafficking has unique features that necessitate aggressive and innovative approaches to justice for trafficking victims. Trafficking is often a transnational crime, involving transporting victims across borders. The networks traffickers create are pervasive and insidious

By: Ryan McNicholas PDF: Finding a New Enforcer The modern world economy has made it easier than ever for large multinational corporations to avoid paying taxes. As corporate tax rates are largely the domain of individual nations, sophisticated companies are incentivized to take advantage of differences in national taxation to minimize their own tax burden. This avoidance creates significant negative effects for impacted countries, which lose out on a significant source of g

By: Tao Huang PDF: Institutional Metaphors The Meta Oversight Board represents a significant institutional innovation in the governance of social media. It offers valuable insights and lessons for regulating content moderation practices on online platforms. Scholars and commentators have employed a variety of metaphors to describe the board: court, human rights tribunal, administrative law judge, arbitration panel, and internal self-regulation mechanism. These metaphors serv

By: Doruk Erhan PDF: The Hyper-Unitary Executive This Article foregrounds the civil bureaucracy as a central yet overlooked site of democratic backsliding. While authoritarian shifts are conventionally associated with the weakening of interbranch checks and balances, this Article focuses on a single branch—the executive—and identifies its internal remaking as a key explanatory variable. It examines the gradual erosion of a sub-constitutional separation of powers, which in or

By: Theophilus Edwin Coleman PDF: The Silent Price of Artificial Intelligence Despite the economic potential of artificial intelligence (AI), significant drawbacks exist, particularly the exploitation of digital labor in developing countries by large AI corporations. A crucial issue in AI development is the reliance on data annotators and digital workers from the Global South to train AI systems or models. These workers perform essential tasks such as labeling, sorting, and

By: Scott M. Brown and Daniel J. Hall PDF: Language, Law, and Wealth This Article examines how Puerto Rico's monolingual Spanish legal regime, rooted in colonial-era civil law and reinforced by nationalist language policies, creates structural barriers that weaken economic integration with the United States. The island's symbolic legal autonomy has produced five entrenched institutional monopolies—in inheritance law, notarial services, property titling, language of legal ins

By: Aaron Simowitz PDF: Contracting Around Treaties International commercial treaties are normally categorized as default or mandatory, rules that private parties can contract around or cannot. This dichotomous categorization misses an important element of treaty design and interpretation. The same considerations that determine whether a treaty is default or mandatory—transaction and error costs, paternalism, and externalities—should also determine how easy or difficult it i

By: Alexis Shaw PDF: Self-Defense Without Overreach The United States has increasingly invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter to justify prolonged military engagements, particularly following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. While Article 51 was intended to safeguard states’ right to self- defense, its ambiguity has allowed states—especially the United States—to stretch self-defense claims beyond their limits, applying them to both state and non-state actors. This ex

By: Daniel Goicouria PDF: Extraterritoriality in AI International AI markets currently operate under divergent and often conflicting competition laws. This splintered approach fosters uncertainty, invites regulatory failure, and risks entrenching dominant firms at the expense of emerging innovators. This Note proposes harmonized enforcement mechanisms to safeguard fair competition and minimize extraterritorial effects on global AI platforms. Recent academic discourse has dis

By: Rosa Celorio PDF: Tides and Crossroads This Article focuses on the recent era of jurisprudence issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on women’s rights and gender equality issues. It discusses the recent tide of the court towards matters concerning women and gender equality, which has led to critical transformations in the carving of regional human rights legal standards. The court has capably transitioned from a civil and political rights tribunal to one tha