Since the close of the Cold War, the international community has created a variety of legal institutions designed to step in when state justice systems fail to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The ad hoc criminal tribunals, the hybrid tribunals (such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the use of universal jurisdiction by national courts are among a new generation of courtly mechanisms designed to hold wrongdoers criminally accountable, state justice systems notwithstanding. These mechanisms represent an era of international judicial involvement in what used to be a more exclusively sovereign matter—the response to mass crimes against civilian populations. Accordingly, they have engendered a slew of scholarship devoted to analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, individually and as a group.

When the skin of an Australian platypus was first taken to England in the 1700s, scientists thought it was a fake. It looked like someone had sewn a duck’s bill onto a beaver’s body; one scientist even took a pair of scissors to the skin looking for stitches. The animal had fur and was warm-blooded like a mammal, yet laid eggs and had webbed feet like a bird or a reptile. Scientists struggled to categorize this unusual creature. Was it a bird, a mammal, or a reptile? Or was it some strange hybrid of all three?

The disagreements among states bordering the South China Sea pose extraordinarily complex legal issues. Sovereignty over small islands that lie at some distance from the continental and insular coasts that surround the sea is contested. So are the maritime entitlements generated by these features. Notably, rocks that cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own generate no entitlement to an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and continental shelf beyond a twelve-mile territorial sea, which may be the case for many of the disputed islands. Yet another series of questions relates to the delimitation of overlapping maritime entitlements, including the relative effect to be accorded entitlements generated by these small islands vis-à-vis those generated by the continental and insular coasts that surround the South China Sea.

The South China Sea has generally been a calm area of sea since ancient times. Until the late twentieth century, it had provided a fertile fishing ground for local fishermen from China and other littoral states, and a smooth route of navigation for the nations of the region and the rest of the international community. This tranquility has been disturbed, however, by two recent developments. The first was the physical occupation of the Nansha, or Spratly, Islands by some of the coastal states in the 1970s. This process continued through the rest of the century. Now, nearly all the islands and insular features within the Spratly Islands have been subjected to physical control by one littoral state or another.

The recent turmoil created by the competing sovereignty claims of several countries over islands and waters in the South China Sea has caused the resurgence of the concept of “historic rights.” Although the term historic rights (sometimes confusingly used in this context in combination with other germane notions, such as historic waters and historic title) has often been imbued with a certain degree of confusion and controversy in international law, it seems bound to play an important part inthe arguments brought by states claiming sovereignty in this region and, in particular, by the People’s Republic of China (China). The vagueness of the legal terminology used by China raises the issue of whether that very vagueness is being used as an element of political strategy.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) establishes a legal framework to govern all uses of the oceans. All of the states bordering the South China Sea—Brunei Darussalam, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam—are parties to UNCLOS. Taiwan, which also borders the South China Sea, has taken steps to bring its legislation into conformity with UNCLOS.

The International Law Commission held its sixty-fourth session in Geneva from May 7 to June 1, and from July 2 to August 3, 2012, under the chairmanship of Lucius Caflisch. The session marked the first year of a new quinquennium (2012–2016), with the Commission having completed its work during the prior quinquennium (2007–2011) on four major topics: transboundary aquifers, effects of armed conflict on treaties, reservations to treaties, and responsibility of international organizations.

For the first time since the Corfu Channel case of 1949, the International Court of Justice (Court) has awarded damages. The Court did so on June 19, 2012, in its third judgment in the Diallo case, brought by the Republic of Guinea for human rights violations committed against a Guinean citizen by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The judgment was also the Court’s first on damages in a human rights case.

In a landmark decision, on December 21, 2011, the Court of Justice upheld the extension to international aviation activities of the greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme (ETS) of the European Union (Union or EU) against a challenge that it violates several treaties and principles of customary international law. In addition to its broader significance in the context of global versus unilateral approaches to tackling climate change, and its related role in fueling a major international trade dispute, the ruling pronounces on important aspects of international aviation law and clarifies the principles governing conformity of EU internal legislation with international law.

In a Mexican challenge against U.S. criteria for labeling tuna products as “dolphin-safe,” the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO), on May 16, 2012, held against the United States while reversing various findings of the panel. The case was one of three WTO Appellate Body decisions issued in 2012 that interpreted and applied the key substantive provisions of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement or TBT) for the first time. Systemically, the decision is important for its interpretation of the TBT Agreement’s substantive obligations, the types of labeling that fall within the scope of the Agreement, the legitimacy of labeling based on foreign process and production methods (PPMs), and the relation of other international law to WTO law.

On August 21, 2012, the Mexican Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Article 57 of the Mexican Code of Military Justice (CMJ) and in doing so complied with several judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (I/A Court). From the point of view of Mexican law, the Supreme Court’s decision means that civilians who have suffered from the unconstitutional expansion of military jurisdiction in Mexico are, for the first time, protected by the federal judiciary. More significant from the perspective of international law, the decision to bring Mexican law into compliance with the judgments of the I/A Court reflects growing acceptance of that Court’s judgments, and international human rights law, by the states parties to the American Convention on Human Rights (American Convention), as well as the general decline of military jurisdiction and impunity in the region.