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Trade Integration
No full textAccounts concerning the world trading system usually start the debate from the negotiation of the GATT. Trade integration before the First World War, though, had been quite remarkable, and the study of this era enriches our understanding of modern institutions in at least two ways. First, a number of GATT provisions had already been shaped during discussions following the advent of the League of Nations. Second, trade integration before the First World War did not manage to put a brake on belligerent behaviour, putting to rest the old Montesquieuan idea of doux commerce. Recent developments (like the invasion of Ukraine by Russia) can be analysed in this context, so that the world trading community can better grasp the limits of trade integration, and its impact on international relations
Disqualification, Immunity, and the Presidency
Get PDFTrump v. Anderson and Trump v. United States were two momentous decisions in a momentous Supreme Court term. Sharing then former — and now current — President Trump as a party, the decisions hold important implications for presidential power and accountability.
Anderson arose from a suit brought by Colorado voters to challenge Trump’s inclusion on the Republican primary ballot in that state. They argued that Trump organized and incited the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and disrupted the Electoral College vote count and certification. In their view, this disqualified him from serving as President under section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which (in relevant part) bars any person who took “an oath ... to support the Constitution ... [and then] engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from “hold[ing] any office ... under the United States.” The Colorado Supreme Court agreed, but the United States Supreme Court reversed, in a per curiam decision with four Justices concurring. It held that the states lack authority to enforce section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates for federal office, concluding that the Constitution assigns that responsibility to Congress.
Trump v. United States arose out of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation and a grand jury’s indictment of Trump for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election “by spreading knowingly false claims of election fraud.” Trump sought to have the indictment against him dismissed on grounds of presidential immunity. The D.C. District Court and the D.C. Circuit both rejected this effort, but the Supreme Court vacated and remanded, this time by a 6–3 vote. It held that a former President enjoys absolute criminal immunity for exercises of core presidential powers and is at least presumptively immune for other official actions.
In Structural Logics of Presidential Disqualification, Professor Aziz Huq trains his eye primarily on Anderson, carefully dissecting the arguments offered by the per curiam opinion and demonstrating their substantial analytic inadequacy. Huq contends that “three distinct structural logics,” or arguments rooted in constitutional structure, underlie the opinion. These logics, sounding in “federalism, the separation of powers, and democracy,” are interwoven with prudential and consequentialist concerns about the national impact of state enforcement of section 3 against presidential candidates. Left by the wayside are the type of textual and historical arguments that the Roberts Court usually claims to prioritize in constitutional analysis. Huq chides the Court for its methodological inconsistency, but the bulk of his critique aims to show the analytic flaws in these structural arguments
Looking for the Public in Public Law
Get PDFThe “public” is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary public law. Everywhere, in that the term is constantly invoked to justify and explain existing arrangements. Nowhere, in that serious attempts to identify a relevant public and elicit its input are few and far between. Scholars and officials depict the U.S. public as playing myriad roles in governance — checking, guiding, approving, repudiating—without offering an account of how public preferences are formed or how they exercise influence on questions of interest.
This Article seeks to identify and call attention to the foundational dilemmas underlying this disconnect, to clarify their normative contours and intellectual history, and to propose a pragmatic response — grounded in the recovery of the public’s role as an author and not just a monitor of public law. We first detail how public law’s stylized appeals to the public reflect analytic imprecision and inattention to the values, views, and votes of actual people. We then show how these omissions and obfuscations leave public law vulnerable to critiques from both the left and the right, which have been gaining force on account of broad transformations in the administrative state, social structure, and public sphere. It may not be possible to resolve these dilemmas fully or to redeem the public writ large as an agent in public law. But drawing on recent political science work on deliberative democracy, we outline a research and reform agenda for identifying, constructing, and empowering coher¬ent publics (plural) capable of legitimating legal change
Time for States to Flex Their Legal Muscles
Get PDFIn these dark several years ahead, with all three branches of the federal government moving backwards on environmental protection, the states can do much to stem the retreat
Will Systematic Stewardship Save the Planet?
No full textThe largest institutional investors have solidified their status as “universal owners,” holding almost eighty percent of the U.S. stock market. The growing influence of these investors over the companies they invest in has sparked optimism among scholars and activists that asset managers will use their clout to steer firms towards Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) objectives. But such optimism may be misplaced. Focusing on carbon emission reduction, we argue that universal owners lack the necessary incentives and competence to pressure corporations to lower emissions.
Universal owners market ESG investments with conflicting promises of “doing well while doing good.” The untenable promise that ESG investments will “do well,” or match the returns of non-ESG funds, prevents universal owners from effectively “doing good,” or meaningfully compelling corporations to reduce emissions. Furthermore, although climate change is a systematic risk, addressing it requires firm-specific engagement. Universal owners, however, lack the incentive to lead firm-specific campaigns. We further demonstrate that no other actors will emerge to provide the required firm-specific engagement.
We argue that universal owners’ distorted incentives should concern even those who believe that climate stewardship is necessary, albeit imperfect, in light of government inaction. We explain why extensive disclosure requirement for ESG funds would not eliminate the distortions caused by their contradictory commitments and consider implications for the ESG movement. While universal owners are ill-equipped to direct corporations toward efficient climate solutions, these investors may nudge environmental legislation forward by ensuring that their portfolio companies’ lobbying efforts are aligned with their pledges to protect the environment
Legal Models for Public-Private City Greening Partnerships
No full textCities are significantly hotter than their surrounding areas. That difference, known as the “urban heat island” effect, is driven in significant part by the dark-colored buildings, sidewalks, roadways, and similar surfaces that dominate urban spaces, absorbing solar energy and later radiating it outward as thermal energy that heats the nearby air. This Comment suggests and describes one avenue through which cities and local community-based organizations (CBOs) could tackle extreme heat: partnering with one another to transform paved surfaces into green or reflective ones. Partnerships of this kind could combine the resources and desire to create green spaces that nongovernmental groups offer with cities’ large portfolios of property
Trump’s Multi-Pronged Attack on Renewable Energy
No full textFederal policy on renewable energy took a 180-degree turn on the day of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The Biden administration had rightly seen a massive expansion of clean energy, especially wind and solar and the associated storage and transmission, as key to moving away from fossil fuels and fighting climate change. But Mr. Trump denies that climate change is a serious problem and works to increase both the supply of and the demand for fossil fuels.
This article discusses the range of actions involved in the Trump administration’s attack on renewable energy
The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It
No full textA fascinating study of the legal underpinnings of capitalism, reasons why the system must be transformed, and actions we can take.
Even though capitalism has been conventionally described as an economic system, it is actually a deeply entrenched legal regime. Law provides the material for coding simple objects, promises, and ideas as capital assets. It also provides the means for avoiding the legal constraints that societies have frequently imposed on capitalism. Often lauded for creating levels of wealth unprecedented in human history, capitalism is also largely responsible for the two greatest problems now confronting humanity: the erosion of social and political cohesion, which undermines democratic self-governance, and the threats that emanate from climate change.
By exploring the ways that Western legal systems empower individuals to advance their interests against society, Katharina Pistor reveals how capitalism is an unsustainable system designed to foster inequity. She offers ideas for rethinking how the transformation of the law and the economy can help us create a more just system — before it is too late.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1402/thumbnail.jp
The ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on Climate Change
No full textThis open-access edited volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of the International Court of Justice’s 2025 Advisory Opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change, one of the most consequential developments in international climate law since the adoption of the Paris Agreement. Bringing together leading scholars and practitioners from across public international law, human rights law, environmental law, and global governance, the book examines how the Court reframed climate change as a matter of binding legal obligation rather than political discretion.
The contributions explore the Opinion’s articulation of state duties under treaties, customary international law, and general principles, including due diligence, the prevention of significant environmental harm, international cooperation, and the protection of human rights. Particular attention is given to the Court’s treatment of reparations and responsibility, its engagement with the law of the sea, displacement and statehood under conditions of sea-level rise, and the implications for energy governance and domestic climate litigation. Several chapters also situate the Opinion within an emerging judicial dialogue alongside the advisory opinions of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Beyond doctrinal clarification, the volume critically engages with what the Court did not say. A dedicated section interrogates silences concerning differentiation of responsibilities, historical and colonial responsibility, military emissions, and regional perspectives, treating judicial restraint as an object of analysis in its own right. Taken together, the chapters show how the Advisory Opinion consolidates an integrated legal framework for climate governance while leaving key questions open for future litigation and interpretation.
By combining close legal analysis with comparative and critical perspectives, this book positions the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion as a legal and institutional watershed whose influence will unfold across international adjudication, national courts, and climate policy debates in the years ahead
In Search of a State
Get PDFThis article offers a legal history of one of America’s earliest campaigns of state legislative resistance: the effort in Massachusetts to protest the national government’s perceived dismantling of an old Atlantic commercial order from 1803 to 1815. To date, scholars have either condemned this protest as a dangerous harbinger of the Civil War or vindicated it as an inevitable and salutary extension of the Founding. This article steers a different course. By focusing on the evolving language of protest and the complex hybrid of ideas and material realities from which this language emerged, this article illuminates how Federalist leaders who were determined to preserve New England’s waning influence in an expanding agricultural nation of slavery created a bespoke rule of state protest, one that elites could deploy without fear of inciting democracy or disunion.
When influential Federalists first sketched out a vision of state protest in 1787 and 1788, they enlisted an old Whig theory of politics that imagined society as an organic composite of the people, whose feelings would naturally flow into the state governments for refinement into virtuous sentiments. Conceived in an eighteenth-century political economy anchored in the Atlantic Ocean, this theory proved no match for the seismic shifts of the 1790s. At a time when a surge of elite land speculation and development brought America’s territorial and class lines into sharper relief, a wave of grassroots political mobilizing insisted on the right of the people to speak directly to power. To stave off this specter of mass politics, Federalist elites embarked on a search for a new rule of state protest. By 1814, this iterative search had coalesced around the idea of the state as a sovereign entity, one whose voice would be activated not by the whim of the people’s feelings, but by the mollifying rules of procedure. In this new order, a state’s speech would encompass not simply virtuous sentiments to be exchanged among a natural aristocracy, but constitutional arguments that could funnel people from the streets to the courts.
This account enriches our understanding of American federalism. Rather than seeing the state and federal governments as fixed entities, it joins recent work that recasts these governments as contested categories. But instead of focusing on the well-mapped political arena, it shows how and why the harvesting of the material world shaped the often haphazard invention of a state. In doing so, it brackets the abstract debate of which federal-state configuration produces the most “good.” Instead, it shows how, amidst a broader project to transform land into waterways and cotton into cloth, Federalist lawyers carefully fashioned a rule of state protest that could keep New England’s merchant ships and cotton mills in motion