This open access volume of LIDC contributions focuses on how competition and intellectual property laws incorporate sustainability objectives. Businesses are increasingly embracing sustainability ...objectives, driven by the international community. Although competition and intellectual property law are certainly not the only tools for addressing sustainability issues, they can play a role in moving toward a more sustainable society. Sustainability has gained prominence in competition law in all jurisdictions covered in this volume. The contributions focus on classic questions such as whether sustainability agreements restrict competition and, if so, to what extent businesses can be exempted on efficiency grounds. The papers also raise a number of questions, in particular concerning the treatment of non-market efficiencies. The soft law and case law produced by competition authorities are examined, and the leadership role of some competition authorities in the field – from advocacy to policy papers and sustainability guidelines – is highlighted. The authors call for more individual guidance to provide enhanced transparency and clarity to industry, advisors and society at large on sustainability issues, with guidelines or sustainability-related block exemptions providing even greater legal certainty. With regard to intellectual property, the contributions examine various important issues, such as the need for intellectual property rights to remain technology-neutral, ways to promote the use of sustainable technologies and incentives for licensing, and ways to promote the dissemination of sustainable technologies, including compulsory licensing, cross-licensing, open source or FRAND licensing, and replacing the destruction of counterfeit goods with recycling. The papers also discuss greenwashing and how it can be addressed through revisions to trademarks and related rights.
Successive hegemonic powers have shaped the foundations of international law. This book examines whether the predominance of the United States is leading to foundational change in the international ...legal system. A range of leading scholars in international law and international relations consider six foundational areas that could be undergoing change, including international community, sovereign equality, the law governing the use of force, and compliance. The authors demonstrate that the effects of US predominance on the foundations of international law are real, but also intensely complex. This complexity is due, in part, to a multitude of actors exercising influential roles. And it is also due to the continued vitality and remaining functionality of the international legal system itself. This system limits the influence of individual states, while stretching and bending in response to the changing geopolitics of our time.
Human use of marine resources is changing, as is the marine environment itself, and our understanding of marine ecosystems and biodiversity is developing. This open access book explores the ...challenges this raises for legal regimes pertaining to the oceans and their domestic implementation. It engages with developments in areas such as bioprospecting, fisheries, deep-sea mining and shipping. Several case studies discuss genetic resources and the implications of the new UN Agreement on marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction. A team of experts suggest new approaches to questions of interpretation, established management principles, and institutional relationships. Not limiting their scope to the international law of the sea, they also examine international environmental law, intellectual property rights, and domestic law. The book broadens the scholarly debate and provides a timely reflection on the dramatic policy developments currently happening in the field of marine resource governance. It will be welcomed by lawyers, NGOs and policymakers. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Gothenburg, Department of Law.
Blockchain is the first global mechanism for the transfer and storage of value. Despite being conceived as an alternative to state and law, the technology and its use cases raise many legal ...questions, most notably, regarding jurisdiction and applicable law with respect to transactions and assets recorded on the blockchain. The issue is complex given the decentralised nature of the network. In this volume, academics and practitioners from various countries try to provide detailed answers to these questions as they relate to crypto-assets, cryptocurrencies, crypto derivatives, stablecoins, Central Bank Digital Currencies and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs), as well as specific transactions and issues, such as property rights, secured transactions, smart contracts and bankruptcy. With specific chapters on national approaches (Germany, Japan, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, United States), the volume explores the need and possibility for legal harmonisation of these issues through global fora, such as the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) UNIDROIT.
This book revisits the theory of the sources of international law from the perspective of formalism. It critically analyzes the virtues of formalism, construed as a theory of law ascertainment, as a ...means of distinguishing between law and non-law. The theory of formalism is re-evaluated against the backdrop of the growing acceptance by international legal theorists of the blurring of the lines between law and non-law. At the same time, the book acknowledges that much international normative activity nowadays takes place outside the ambit of traditional international law and that only a limited part of the exercise of public authority at the international level results in the creation of international legal rules. The theory of ascertainment that the book puts forward attempts to dispel some of the illusions of formalism that accompany the delimitation of customary international law. It also sheds light on the tendency of scholars, theorists, and advocates to deformalize the identification of international legal rules with a view to expanding international law. The book seeks to revitalize and refresh the formal identification of rules by engaging with some tenets of the postmodern critique of formalism. As a result, the book not only grapples with the practice of law-making at the international level, but it also offers broad theoretical insights on international law, dealing with the main schools of thought in legal theory (positivism, naturalism, legal realism, policy-oriented jurisprudence, and postmodernism).
This open access book examines the conflict of law rules in East Asian states. With a focus on the laws in Mainland China, Japan and South Korea, the book also looks at the rules of Hong Kong and ...Taiwan. Beyond a description of the substance of the current law, the book highlights the evolution these jurisdictions have undergone since being adopters of rules developed in European and North American legal systems. As evidenced by recent modernisations in their private law regimes, these East Asian states are now innovators, creating rules that are more suited to the local concerns. Significantly, the new approaches to private international law taken by China and Japan are themselves being adopted by other jurisdictions, shifting the locus of influence in this important area of law. The chapters in Part 1 give a contextual overview of the legal regimes of Mainland China, Japan, and South Korea. This part is intended to foster a deeper understanding of how the systems are changing to better fit the particular national approaches to law. A more in-depth view of the rules on private international law follows in Part 2, where the rules of Hong Kong and Taiwan are set forth in addition to those of the rest of China, Japan and South Korea. Part 3 provides a detailed look at the conflict rules relevant to commercial law, specifically as regards international jurisdiction of courts, while Part 4 examines the rules applying to family and succession law. Written in an easily accessible style, the book is a valuable resource for scholars as well as practitioners of East Asian law, private international law, and comparative law. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.
Recent decades have witnessed an impressive process of normative development in international law. Numerous new treaties have been concluded, at global and regional levels, establishing far-reaching ...international legal and regulatory regimes in important areas such as human rights, international trade, environmental protection, criminal law, intellectual property, and more. New political and judicial institutions have been established to develop, apply and adjudicate these rules. This trend has been accompanied by the growing consolidation of treaty norms into international custom, and increased references to international law in domestic settings. As a result of these developments, international relations have now reached an unprecedented level of normative density and intensity, but they have also given rise to the phenomenon of ‘fragmentation’. The debate over the fragmentation of international law has largely focused on conflicts: conflicts of norms and conflicts of authority. However, the same developments that have given rise to greater conflict and contradiction in international law, have also produced a growing amount of normative equivalence between rules in different fields of international law. New treaty rules often echo existing international customary norms. Regional arrangements reinforce undertakings that already exist at the global level; and common concerns and solutions appear in many international legal fields. This book focuses on such instances of normative parallelism, developing the concept of ‘multisourced equivalent norms’ in international law, with contributions by leading international law experts exploring the legal and political implications of the concept in a variety of contexts that span the full spectrum of international legal norms and institutions. By concentrating on situations governed by a multitude of similar norms, the book emphasizes the importance of legal contexts and institutional settings to international law-interpretation and application.
InWars of Law, Tanisha M. Fazal assesses the unintended consequences of the proliferation of the laws of war for the commencement, conduct, and conclusion of wars over the course of the past one ...hundred fifty years.
After a brief history of the codification of international humanitarian law (IHL), Fazal outlines three main arguments: early laws of war favored belligerents but more recent additions have constrained them; this shift may be attributable to a growing divide between lawmakers and those who must comply with IHL; and lawmakers have been consistently inattentive to how rebel groups might receive these laws.
By using the laws of war strategically, Fazal suggests, belligerents in both interstate and civil wars relate those laws to their big-picture goals. InWars of Law, we learn that, as codified IHL proliferates and changes in character-with an ever-greater focus on protected persons-states fighting interstate wars become increasingly reluctant to step over any bright lines that unequivocally oblige them to comply with IHL. On the other hand, Fazal argues, secessionists fighting wars for independence are more likely to engage with the laws of war because they have strong incentives to persuade the international community that, if admitted to the club of states, they will be good and capable members of that club.
Why have states stopped issuing formal declarations of war? Why have states stopped concluding formal peace treaties? Why are civil wars especially likely to end in peace treaties today? Addressing such basic questions about international conflict, Fazal provides a lively and intriguing account of the implications of the laws of war.
Between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, major European political thinkers first began to look outside their national borders and envisage a world of competitive, equal sovereign ...states inhabiting an international sphere that ultimately encompassed the whole globe. In this insightful and wide-ranging work, David Armitage – one of the world's leading historians of political thought – traces the genesis of this international turn in intellectual history. Foundations of Modern International Thought combines important methodological essays, which consider the genealogy of globalisation and the parallel histories of empires and oceans, with fresh considerations of leading figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Burke and Bentham in the history of international thought. The culmination of more than a decade's reflection and research on these issues, this book restores the often overlooked international dimensions to intellectual history and recovers the intellectual dimensions of international history.
This book explores the interplay between International Law and Chemical, Biological, Radio-Nuclear (CBRN) risks. An all-hazards approach is adopted to cover events of intentional, accidental and ...natural origin, and international obligations are presented according to the phases of the emergency management cycle, including prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.
