This chapter deals with Germany’s position on State jurisdiction and immunities. The first part, Jurisdiction of the State, addresses Germany releasing an Iranian citizen in a prisoner swap, as well as Germany considering further US sanctions on Nord Stream 2, a pipeline project delivering gas from Russia to Germany, an encroachment on its sovereignty as it understands them to be extraterritorial in nature. The second part, State immunity, deals with the Federal Constitutional Court classifying Greek debt restructuring measures as acta iure imperii. While the chapter agrees with the decision, it criticizes the Federal Constitutional Court for missing the opportunity to advance the discussion of a contentious matter of public international law. Another article assesses Germany’s (non)participation in US court proceedings for alleged colonial genocide and enslavement of the Ovaherero and Nama in what was formerly known as South West Africa and is now Namibia. The chapter argues that Germany is not answerable and that Namibia’s position in its negotiations with the German government over a political declaration concerning atrocities committed during colonial rule was weakened.

This chapter aims to investigate the extent to which the Netherlands has attempted to rein in transnational corporations from developing and emerging states by imposing requirements as a matter of regulatory compliance, either directly as an obligation formulated in a rule, or indirectly by offering corporations the opportunity to defend against civil violations. Section 1 of this chapter examines the Dutch Child Labour Duty of Care Law (2019). An evaluation of the parliamentary debates increases our understanding as to whether and to what extent competition from non-Dutch corporations – and, in particular, transnational corporations from developing and emerging states – in the global marketplace has had an impact on the stringency and reach of this legislative initiative. Section 2 discusses the (largely hypothetical) avenues available to bring claims against transnational corporations from developing and emerging states in Dutch courts.

Although transnational law is often characterized as ‘non-state law’, states actually play a significant role in the construction and operation of much transnational regulation. Chapter 6 examines the most common ways that states do this. These include: by giving transnational effect to their own domestic laws – what is known as ‘extraterritoriality’; by imposing economic sanctions against regimes that are not comporting with transnational legal norms; by adjudicating transnational regulatory disputes in their domestic courts – i.e., ‘transnational litigation’; and by collaborating in the formation of intergovernmental networks that shape and sometimes even create transnational regulatory regimes. Each of these techniques has its own set of comparative advantages and disadvantages insofar as both their efficacy and their legitimacy implications.

Looked at through the topic of State responsibility, chapter five underlines the continued importance and relevance of the general rules of international law in addressing some of the challenges encountered when dealing with State corporate ownership and human rights. The first part of the chapter provides an introduction to the nature and scope of State responsibility in international law with particular emphasis being placed on the role and process of attribution. In this context, the rules of attribution found in Articles 4, 5 and 8 of the International Law Commission Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts are examined in detail. The second part of the chapter analyses how the concept of due diligence becomes relevant when certain acts and omissions cannot be attributed to the State because those acts are not perpetrated by State organs, by actors that exercise governmental authority, or by those that are not under the 'effective control' of the State. In such cases, States, can nevertheless, be held responsible for a failure to act diligently to take all the necessary measures to prevent or punish the occurrence of a specific act.

Chapter 5 examines the traditional Islamic rules on jurisdiction. Modern rules on the jurisdiction of domestic courts exist in the context of the system of States, whereas the historic Islamic rules on jurisdiction and the assumptions upon which they were based relate to a system which was premised upon an imperial ideal that approached core concepts of modern Private International Law from different vantage points. The manner and extent to which pre-modern substantive rules, coupled with an imperial imagination, have permeated into the modern domestic law of Muslim Family Law States differs between such states, but nonetheless reveals a shared problem that we suggest animates the ongoing debates around the 1980 Hague Abduction Convention. Policies of ‘Islamisation’ pursued in certain Muslim Family Law States have at various times sought to reintroduce selected interpretations of Islam into the areas of domestic law pertinent to the study. Thus, the process is not necessarily a linear one over time where the historic rules have become marginalised, but rather one where there is an ebb and flow over time – the extent of which differs between Muslim Family Law States.

This chapter considers the major features of international environmental governance that are manifestations of altruism. It begins from the observation that the very premise of international environmental law is the no-harm principle which, while not altruistic per se, illustrates the structurally inherent concern for the other at the heart of the regime. The chapter continues by appraising the emergence of concern for the individual, and in particular procedures through which those in other countries can participate in environmental decision-making or have recourse to justice where they are subject to environmental harm. Moreover, international human rights law is interacting with international environmental law to extend the environmental obligations that states have to people third countries. The universality of international environmental law obligations is also manifested in principles such as intergenerational equity, which is an altruistic consideration for people of the future. Finally, the chapter considers the increasing prevalence of common but differentiated responsibilities and commitments made to developing countries in the area of environmental protection. A particular focus is placed on the importance of financial and technical assistance.

Chapter 6 examines the Muslim Family Laws of the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, and Malaysia in light of their jurisprudence on jurisdiction. The selection of these states represents a geographically, culturally, and legally diverse sample, across which Islamic Law remains legally relevant. The chapter examines how differing approaches to jurisdiction or child custody have been adopted and what the implications of these are or may be in the context of seeking to address international parental child abduction. The selected case studies highlight different approaches that lend themselves to finding solutions to addressing international parental child abductions. One matter that traverses all three case studies concerns the capacity of domestic judges, with subject matter jurisdiction on family law, to think jurisdictionally. As the case studies show, a key concern for policy-makers in Muslim Family Law States has been to consider a whole-of-law approach to jurisprudence. For others, the challenge lies in recognising the Muslim Family Law States as disaggregated institutionally, and to strategise approaches that are institution-specific.

In 1855 Siam signed the Bowring Treaty with Britain, the first of 15 unequal trade treaties with nations around the world. The treaties introduced to Siam extraterritoriality, or consular jurisdiction over foreign subjects in exclusion of Thai authorities’ jurisdiction, using specially established consular or international courts staffed by foreign judges. As well documented and discussed elsewhere, this extraterritoriality led to the pressure for the country to modernise its legal system and introduce legal codes modelled on codes in civil law countries such as France, Germany and Japan. Much less examined is the quiet and latent influence of common law during this important juncture of the country’s legal history. This chapter looks at some of the leading British lawyers in Siam who, following the abolition of the international court, sat in the Supreme Court of Siam, or Dika Court, as members of the ‘Committee of the Supreme Court’, an equivalence of modern day judges. The chapter examines their legal backgrounds, their legal careers in Siam, and their role as Supreme Court judges. As the chapter traces through their work, our inquiry reveals a fascinating dynamic of common law legal reasoning and principles in a civil law, code-based jurisdiction. This investigation into the role of these British judges during the formative years of Siam’s newly established legal system, often understated and unexplored in academic literature, is crucial for a more complete understanding of the country’s process of modernisation.

Nineteenth-century international lawyers inherited a discipline in flux and inhabited a world of rapid change. As capitalism entered a period of crisis and Western imperial adventures intensified, the first generation of professional international lawyers grappled with the need to construct order. The ‘standard of civilisation’ arose as a disciplinary response to the contradictions of global capitalism. This chapter provides a detailed account of the contours of the ‘logic of biology’ and the ‘logic of improvement’. It details both the constant presence of racialised, gendered and infantilising tropes in the writings of the discipline’s ‘fathers’ and their insistence that capitalist modernity was the only path to civilisation and, by implication, to equal rights and duties under international law. The struggles over extraterritoriality demonstrate the concrete stakes of these theoretical constructions as well as the role of semi-peripheral lawyers who adopted and transformed ‘civilisation’ in order to serve the interests of their own domestic ruling classes.

This chapter discusses the two wars between Great Britain and the Qing Empire in 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. Usually viewed separately it makes sense to consider the two together. Both conflicts were about two sets of concerns: First, the British wanted a framework where British merchants had access to multiple ports, limited taxes, no restrictions on who they could trade with, and legalized imports of opium. Second, the British wanted a new system of diplomatic and political relations. Rejecting existing Qing systems of diplomatic relations such as the tribute system, the British wanted to utilize European diplomatic practices and international law as an institutional framework. Victory in both wars allowed Britain to redefine the frameworks of both trade and diplomacy in the manner they saw fit, creating the treaty system that would last until World War II.

Chapter 1 problematises the classic history of diplomacy in relation to extraterritoriality and presents the key debates in IR and international law to which this study contributes. This chapter further shows that classic diplomatic history's focus on embassies and Grotius to historicise extraterritoriality has contributed to the Westphalian imaginaries that remain dominant and maintain linear trajectories of the shift from personal to territorial concepts of sovereignty. If a range of new studies, focused on biographical and cultural aspects of diplomacy, are also contesting this approach and account of early modern jurisdiction, they nevertheless remain limited in terms of not fundamentally questioning the link between extraterritorial and territorial sovereignty based on the analysis of ambassadorial immunity and the shift from the personal – the ambassador – to the territorial – the embassy. These limitations call for new approaches to the history of extraterritoriality.

Chapter 7 discusses the conceptual and historiographical implications of the analysis of consuls in Chapter 5 and of the jurisdictional practices of accumulation in Chapter 6. Exploring different meanings of jurisdiction for the doctrine of the law of nations in Castile and for England’s famous Calvin’s Case reveals the importance of the difference between transplants and transports of authority as shaped by different notions of dominium. In effect, transplants of authority refer to notions of dominium that incorporate both ownership of things and people and rule or judicial authority over things and people. In contrast, transports of authority refer to a more restricted notion of dominium focused on the ownership of things, or what some might identify as private property. Finally, in the Mediterranean, jurisdictional accumulation reveals how early modern consuls, as the most significant and neglected of jurisdictional actors, were shaping key legal fictions (political–economic and Christian–non-Christian) that were maintained in the later-nineteenth-century’s construction of modern international law, and which contributed to excluding peoples from the standards of civilisation.

This chapter follows the new mobilities and barriers across the Indian Ocean that arose with colonial capitalist wars beginning in the 1700s. Asian migrants, their experience of indentured labor, and their modes of contestation, endurance, and resistance feature centrally here.