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Abstract:
The relationship between international law and domestic law is rarely understood as a conflict of laws. Understanding it in this way opens up a parallel with the field of conflict of laws: the field for which the relationship between legal systems, especially the role of another system's jurisdiction, laws, and judgments vis-à-vis the domestic legal system, are exactly the bread-and-butter issues. We argue for such an approach to international law in domestic courts: an approach that we elaborate as "theory through technique."

In our view, conflicts should be seen broadly as the discipline that developed to deal with conflicts between laws, without necessarily being committed to any one method or policy. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that it is precisely the seemingly negative features of conflicts - the field's high degree of technicality disparaged as a "conflict-of-laws machine" and the multitude of theories famously deemed a "dismal swamp" - that figure among the advantages of a conflict-of-laws approach to international law in domestic courts.

A conflict-of-laws approach offers ways to respect the nature of international law as law, without simplifying that nature by characterizing it exactly as domestic law. In addition, seeing the parallel with conflict of laws brings a wealth of experience that can enrich and refine the debate on international law in domestic courts. Finally, the parallel with conflicts changes international law in domestic courts from a specific problem addressed by international and constitutional lawyers into a general problem of relativism - which, we argue, conflict of laws is uniquely positioned to address.

International law and domestic courts, Conflict of Laws, Private International Law, International Law

Abstract:
This introduction to our co-edited special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems addresses how interdisciplinary studies might contribute to the revitalization of the field of Conflict of Laws. The introduction surveys existing approaches to interdisciplinarity in conflict of laws - drawn primarily from economics, political science, anthropology and sociology. It argues that most of these interdisciplinary efforts have remained internal to the law, relating conflicts to other legal spheres and issue areas. It summarizes some of the contributions of these projects but also outlines the ways they fall short of the full promise of interdisciplinary work in Conflicts scholarship, and indeed often replicate the very shortfalls of Conflicts doctrine that they set out to overcome. Drawing on examples from the symposium, the article then argues that there is much to be gained - in both law and other fields - from a more "external" interdisciplinarity that engages nonlegal disciplines such as economics, political science, and anthropology in a more serious and sustained way. It outlines a number of ways cross-disciplinary engagement, like the kind in this symposium, can push the project further: by approaching the study of conflicts through its discourse and imagery, through the historical and present-day context of colonialism, and through ethnographies that detail how its doctrines are experienced and produced in the real world. The final section discusses how the interdisciplinary insights yielded by the symposium might provide a richer and more productive techniques and practices for addressing conflict of laws problems.

conflict of laws, private international law, legal theory, colonialism, feminism, anthropology, legal history

Abstract:
No abstract available.

international law, legal theory, feminism, women

Abstract:
This article argues first and foremost for seeing private international law as a private side of citizenship. Part I distinguishes citizenship’s private side from its public side, and presents private international law as the private side of citizenship in the Roman tradition. In part II, English and Canadian private international law cases involving enemy aliens and illegal immigrants serve to illustrate how private international law turns assumptions about citizenship upside down. In addition, the analysis of these cases leads to the article’s second argument, which is that in times of great stress for a state - war, wide-scale illegal immigration, stark cultural difference - private international law can sometimes be more cosmopolitan than public law, and in illuminating ways. Differentiating cosmopolitan form from cosmopolitan tradition and space leads to the article’s third argument; namely, that private international law’s importance for citizenship is not only as a neglected private side of it, but also as a lens on citizenship more generally. Using the rules on proof of foreign law as an example, part III demonstrates how private international law might be a non-intuitive but promising way of thinking through issues integral to multiculturalism and citizenship generally.

Conflict of Laws, Private International Law, Citizenship, Immigration, Aliens, Multiculturalism

Abstract:
Gender and Human Rights takes three sets of ideas basic to women's international human rights law - ideas about feminism, about rights and how they operate, and about the organization of international society - and explores these ideas and the relationships between them from a variety of interdisciplinary and legal perspectives, including through notions of citizenship, queer theory, philosophies of rights, post-colonialism, and migration studies, and via such areas of law as constitutional and humanitarian law. The collection thus encourages us to revisit some of the fundamentals of women's international human rights law: to consider hard questions about core concepts, to re-evaluate accepted methods, to probe the limits of central paradigms, and to ask where familiar critiques may ultimately lead.

Part of the Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law, the volume features a number of authors and themes based in Europe. As a contribution to a women's international human rights literature that has often concentrated on the portability of a few Western-inspired feminist approaches and struggled to make visible a range of non-Western alternatives, this collection seeks to illustrate that, on the Western side, there are many different European perspectives on gender and human rights. Indeed, there are many different Europes: among them, a historical, imperial Europe, the multicultural Europe to which the European Union aspires, and a contemporary Europe redefined by transmigration. The encounters within each of these Europes are shown to hold important lessons for key issues of gender and human rights.

Contributors: Karen Knop (University of Toronto), Nicola Lacey (London School of Economics), Janet Halley (Harvard Law School), Susanne Baer (Humboldt University, Berlin), Ruth Rubio-Marin (University of Seville, Spain), Martha Morgan (University of Alabama), Patricia Viseur Sellers (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia), Nathaniel Berman (Brooklyn Law School), and Ruba Salih (University of Bologna, Italy).