The Article examines the trend of court forum proliferation through the lens of two episodes: the U.S. military commissions system, which was established following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and endorsed by the subsequent administration and Congresses, and the 2005 controversy over proposed Sharia law family arbitration tribunals in Canada, which culminated in the termination of an existing practice of alternative dispute resolution. In analyzing these seemingly different courts of limited jurisdiction, the Article assesses the virtues and vices of court specialization, discussing whether - and how - such courts may fit into the judicial framework of a liberal democracy. It concludes that, rather than presenting a threat to the rule-of-law ideal, court specialization may promote democratic values, improve access to courts, and deliver more accurate judicial results. The Article further reflects on the role of innovative institutional design in realizing this democratic potential.

This Article proposes a different way of thinking about the question of whether customary international law is the "law of the land." It looks back to the nineteenth century and to the once-parallel treatment of customary international law and general maritime law, finding that the two were linked closely by the end of the century. But, in the twentieth century, their treatment diverged dramatically as Supreme Court decisions "constitutionalized" the general maritime law and did not do the same for customary international law. General maritime law is supreme under Article VI of the Constitution and preempts contrary state law, but it does not automatically allow matters arising under it to be characterized as federal questions. This Article proposes that customary international law be re-linked to general maritime law and share both its status as "law of the land" and its implied preemption of state law.

This Article challenges the widely held view that the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) imposes liability on private corporations for violations of customary international law. I lay out the modern origins and development of this cause of action in U.S. federal courts and argue that doctrine rests on shaky, indeed illusory, analytical and jurisprudential foundations. Despite the absence of a well defined norm of customary international law that imposed liability upon private corporations, courts, when they even considered the validity of the claims, built a consensus around the fact that no norm existed forbidding the imposition of liability on private corporations. This doctrinal approach was particularly questionable in light of the Supreme Court's position that recognition of causes of action under the ATS be limited to situations involving violations of norms that are specific, universal, and obligatory. Finally, I argue that the rise of this flawed consensus reveals that our system of federal courts is particularly ill-suited to the type of independent lawmaking that modern ATS doctrine has enabled up to this point. These developments indicate that courts should adopt a restrictive approach to corporate liability under the ATS going forward.

One of the most important empirical questions today in international economic law is whether bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are likely to promote inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). This Article presents a novel, multi-method examination of that question. Using regression analysis, I show that BITs are not meaningfully correlated with measures of political risk. Using survey evidence, I show that providers of political risk insurance do not reliably take BITs into account when deciding the terms of insurance. Nor do in-house counsel in large U.S. corporations view BITs as playing a major role in their companies' foreign investment decisions. In contrast to existing empirical studies, which claim to prove that BITs can have massive positive impacts on FDI, my results suggest that such results may be spurious. It appears that BITs are unlikely to significantly drive foreign investment.

Sized at 32 billion dollars, the human-trafficking industry is the second largest and fastest growing criminal industry in the world, exploiting upwards of 12.3 million people at any given time. Direct profits and reported abuses, however, represent only the tip of the iceberg, as these figures do not capture the expansive and destructive economic, political, and societal consequences that permeate national economies, global business, transnational borders, private homes, human relationships, and world culture. Human trafficking, or trafficking in persons, is a form of modern-day slavery. Such trafficking is internationally defined as the recruitment, transport, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons through means of threat, force, fraud, coercion, deception, payment, or abuses of power or vulnerabilities for the purpose of exploitation.