The familiar description of fiduciary law erases European and US imperialism. There is no discussion of the ways in which fiduciary law framed imperial struggles over political and economic power. There is no mention of the roles that fiduciary law played in various European empires and the US Empire between the late fifteenth century, when imperial expansion began, and the time of rapid decolonization in the 1960s. This chapter is a summary of a political economy of fiduciary law and imperialism that I hope to develop at length and in detail. My argument is that the familiar description of the economic structure of fiduciary law is incomplete. So too is the autonomy-enhancing account of fiduciary law. Fiduciary law, I want to argue, may enhance exploitation to facilitate market exchange. It provided an ideological justification for imperial expansion in the interests of opening up trade between peoples. Fiduciary law, moreover, played institutional roles in the financing, administration, and oversight of imperial exploitation and the facilitation of trade among those who benefitted from it.

What would it mean to say that the public trust doctrine is transnational law? This chapter addresses that question. My main conclusion is that the public trust doctrine is a transnational legal norm but not a transnational legal order. To unpack this claim, I apply concepts from Gregory Shaffer and Terence Halliday’s theory of transnational legal orders (TLOs). My claim is that the public trust doctrine is not a transnational legal order in the way that, say, the rule of law is a transnational legal order. In using the public trust doctrine as a case study of the transnational dimensions of public fiduciary law, this chapter aims to introduce an empirically focused socio-legal approach into conversations about public fiduciary theory. Some scholars have made the conceptual claim that public fiduciary law is transnational in scope. In response, this chapter suggests the need for rigorous analysis of normative settlement (or lack thereof) around public fiduciary norms. To the extent that public fiduciary theory aims to reform transnational law, it must confront the challenges of achieving normative settlement in legal practice. The public trust doctrine’s transnational career is a case study in these challenges.

The author starts by observing that discussions about the foundations and the limits of the powers of international courts, including those of the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter ECtHR), turn around the aims of achieving legal certainty, ensuring legitimacy and justice, and avoiding conflicting obligations which may emanate from different regimes of international law. The chapter reflects on these aims from the perspective of consent as the common basis of the main sources of international law, as listed in Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Proceeding from the case law of the ECtHR, the chapter explores how the recent work of the International Law Commission conceives the role of consent in respect of the main sources of international law, and whether the jurisprudence of the ECtHR remains within the framework of general international law so enunciated.

The conclusion looks back over the myths to consider where we’ve come from and where we can go next. We already have language patterns, subconscious knowledge, and interest in language to help us. With awareness of timeworn myths, we can move to a new metaphor for writing: a continuum with shared purposes, as well as distinct patterns. A continuum allows us to recognize the range of informal and formal, personal and impersonal, interpersonal and informational writing our world demands. It allows us to see that all these kinds of English writing are systematic, meaningful, similar, and distinct. It allows us to approach the full continuum as fodder for knowledge and exploration.

The chapter explores the question of how different domestic and international law approaches to regulating the international transfer of personal data deal with cybersecurity threats. It examines the 2016 EU General Data Protection Regulation, the 2021 UK National Security and Investment Act, and the 2018 United States, Mexico and Canada Agreement, as representing distinct approaches for regulating international data transfers, namely data protection legislation, investment screening legislation, and digital trade agreements. The analysis demonstrates that a lack of uniformity in terms of what constitutes an adequate level and design of data protection mechanisms has left the issue of how to distinguish between acceptable and non-acceptable data-transfer restrictions largely unresolved.

The chapter discusses cybersecurity from the perspective of human rights protection. It first identifies adopting border measures as one approach to fulfilling a state’s duty to protect its citizens against human rights violations caused by cybercrimes. It then examines the tension between these FDI restrictive border measures and states’ investment protection and promotion obligations under IIAs. The analysis demonstrates a limitation in the current international law framework in which invoking the concept of national security remains the only means for states to address cyberthreats, which involves the risk of an accelerating shift to protectionism.

The chapter analyses existing regional cybersecurity treaties to highlight the differences in these treaties that reflect the divide between the state-oriented and market-oriented models of internet governance, and to find possible areas of convergence that may pave the way towards global co-operation. It also discusses the role and limitations of the private sector, including IT industries, technical experts, and civil societies, in cybersecurity governance. Realistic scenarios of future global cybersecurity governance would envision expanding and strengthening regional co-operation and co-operation between like-minded states. However, reaching a consensus on particular cybersecurity issues will not automatically result in effective cybersecurity governance. Fundamental differences in the levels of cyber-preparedness and the ability of states to combat cybercrimes will create a living space for cybercriminals and other malign actors to engage in illegal activities. Continuous efforts to support states with less cybercapacity, including through strengthening education, technical skills, and material resources should accompany any attempts to create cybersecurity governance norms.

European writers in the 1780s praised the American Revolution and the creation of America’s Constitutional Republic as modern historical examples of human progress and the advance of human rights. These themes shaped the pro-American writings of authors who remained in Europe as well as those who crossed the Atlantic to make direct observations. Optimistic Europeans thus emphasized the emerging nation’s political progress in constructing constitutions and representative governments, social progress in fostering personal freedoms and commercial expansion, cultural progress in establishing enlightened education and religious tolerance, and moral progress in creating virtuous citizens and national leaders. But these same writers also condemned the new American nation for defending the regressive, rights-denying system of enslaved labor and for promoting new economic inequalities or consumerism. A critical narrative about the regressive, unenlightened aspects of the new society in the United States showed that European theorists understood how structural dangers threatened the new republic, even as they celebrated its revolutionary achievements. They feared that social contradictions within the new nation would undermine its political ideals and its more democratic social aspirations.

In this chapter, I will look at how the twin projects of cultural and political decolonization in the overlapping fields of literature and law played out over the past hundred years in order to consider how the problem of “formal” decolonization – the filling of foreign colonial administrative structures and cultural educational systems with “native” content – can detour and defer a more radical decolonization of form itself, rooting out the intrinsic eurocentrism at the bottom of both international law and comparative literature. Calls to decolonize (whether territory or a curriculum), especially in the current name of “the decolonial,” often appeal to the language of human rights, but human rights are intentionally counterrevolutionary, designed to forestall the possibility of radical disruption by expanding the compass of the universal to include, over time, people and peoples historically excluded from its coverage.

This chapter assesses the effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War on the Cold War consensus and compares the Nixon and Carter administrations realist and liberal policy appproaches.

This chapter discusses the position (and especially protection) of the individual in international law, whether through human rights law, refugee law, the right to self-determination, or other means

This chapter describes why the World Trade Organization (WTO) has proven such a great challenge for the representation of women and women’s interests. Some progress has been made since the Aid-for-Trade programme, which cooperates with the WTO, incorporated gender mainstreaming in 2011. This includes the adoption of the 2017 Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment and the inauguration of the WTO Gender Research Hub in 2021. Nevertheless, to date the WTO has lagged behind other international organizations, including organizations of global economic governance, in representing women and their interests. The chapter posits the following reasons in historical context: (i) Women did not ‘get in on the ground floor’ at the WTO; (ii) The locus of power at the WTO rests with the members (exemplified by the requirement for consensus and the ’single undertaking’, the importance of member proposals, and the institutional weakness of the Secretariat); (iii) The relative lateness and weakness of WTO involvement with civil society, compared to other institutions of global economic governance; (iv) The formative clashes during the 1980s and 1990s between gender and trade activism and trade liberalization; (v) The lex specialis nature of the WTO dispute settlement system; (vi) The WTO is primarily a ‘hard-law’ institution.