Colloquium: International Law from an Economic Perspective
Lecturers: Eric Posner and Evan Wallach
The last two decades have witnessed a surge of international law cases on the dockets of American courts. The revival of Alien Tort Statute litigation requires courts to discover norms of international law and enforce them against defendants in lawsuits brought by aliens. The war on terror has raised complicated questions about whether domestic courts ought to force the U.S. government to comply with international norms and laws. The increasing economic integration of the world has brought countless disputes over cross-border transactions, often with foreign governments, into the federal courts. Finally, Supreme Court justices sometimes use international standards to determine the constitutionality of domestic statutes.
In this colloquium, we will examine these trends using a law-and-economics framework. Questions to be posed include: What is international law? Why do states enter treaties? How is international law enforced in the absence of a world government? How should domestic courts treat judgments of international courts and foreign courts? We will also discuss important international institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, and important areas of international law such as human rights law, the laws of war and international criminal law.
Lecturers: Eric Posner is a Professor of Law at University of Chicago Law School, and the co-author of The Limits of International Law. Evan Wallach is a judge on the Court of International Trade. He is a combat veteran of Vietnam, and during the Persian Gulf War served in the Pentagon as an Attorney/Advisor in the International Affairs Division of the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the Army, where he dealt with operational law issues and participated in war crimes investigations.