Foreword ♦ Article
Foreword: Celebrating 65 Years of International Law Scholarship
As Volume 65 of the Virginia Journal of International Law goes to press one last time, we mark not only another year of rigorous scholarship in international law but also a milestone in VJIL’s enduring contribution to global legal discourse. For 65 years, VJIL has served as a premier forum for innovative ideas, careful analysis, and critical engagement with the legal issues that share our world. To commemorate the path we have traveled, our Executive Board undertook key initiatives during our tenure to document VJIL’s legacy and foster its lasting footprint.
KRISTINA LORCH & QIUYANG (MARX) WANG
Contemporary International Law♦ Article
The Abuse of Neutrality
Neutrality law is a musty and obsolete body of international law that nevertheless rears its creaky head now and again in dangerous ways, most recently in the Russia- Ukraine conflict. The law of neutrality is a study in contradictions. It is obsolete yet remains on the books in treaties and military manuals. It purports to keep the peace and protect non-warring states yet today is invoked to expand conflict and protect aggressors. The legal benefits of neutrality have been entirely overtaken by other regimes. And yet neutrality law has not lost its luster despite losing its value. Instead of letting it fade into respectable oblivion, states, scholars, and practitioners continue to resurrect neutrality law as pretext for inaction and as justification for the unjustifiable. In the process, they muddy the legal waters, making escalation to war more rather than less likely. This Article seeks to put an end to this abuse of neutrality law, ideally by interring it for good.
REBECCA INGER
International Banking Law♦ Article
Sovereignty and Legitimacy in International Banking Law
In the United States, as elsewhere around the globe, the prudential regulation of large banks is based on standards promulgated by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS or Basel Committee). In this transnational organization, bank regulators from leading jurisdictions come together to agree to highly detailed and prescriptive standards for large, internationally active banks. National implementations of the Basel rules and standards typically differ from the BCBS standard in only minor ways. The legitimacy of this rule-making process recently came under intense scrutiny when U.S. bank regulators proposed controversial regulations intended to complete the post-2008 rule-making package known as Basel 3 in July 2023. The substantive and procedural shortcomings with the proposed Basel 3 (so-called) “endgame” rule have shined a light on long-standing flaws with the legal and democratic legitimacy of the Basel regime.
DAVID MURPHY & CHRISTINA PARAJON SKINNER
Volume 65 ♦ Issue 3 ♦ March 2025
Technology and Data♦ Note
The Transatlantic Data Flow Dilemma
As we text, post, purchase, and engage online, the data of our daily lives is captured, stored, and shared—often without our knowledge or consent. In response, governments across the world have taken markedly different approaches to protecting their citizens’ personal data from unauthorized collection and dissemination. This Note focuses on the efforts of the European Union and the United States to agree on a legal basis for transfers of personal data across the Atlantic.
JEFF STAUTBERG
Contemporary International Law ♦ Article
The Law of Information States: Evidence from China and the United States
Government could not function—legally, administratively, or politically—without producing information about the population, the economy, crime, elections, public health, and more. This Article theorizes the informational incentives of political and administrative officials and the legal interventions that can control them. It then uses case studies in the United States and China to illustrate those informational dynamics in practice. Our account reveals a novel form of information regulation: government structure and, in particular, the vertical division of informational powers between levels of government, or “informational federalism.” We describe the use of informational federalism and its distinctive functions as part of the portfolio of informational production law in regimes that are both strongly federalist like the United States and strongly centralized like China.
BRIDGET FAHEY, YUPING LIN, & TAISU ZHANG
Contemporary International Law ♦ Article
International Law and the Rise of Populism
Contemporary legal scholarship seeks to diagnose populist antagonism towards national and international law and warn about the challenges it poses to the cooperation needed to respond to global threats. What this scholarship overlooks, however, is the role that major shifts in international legal normativity and conceptions of global governance have themselves played in incubating the conditions for the rise of populism.
PETER G. DANCHIN, JEREMY FARRALL, JOLYON FORD, SHRUTI RANA & IMOGEN SAUNDERS
International Conflict and War♦ Article
War’s Rustic Code of Honor
With armed conflict raging all around, international law generally, and the law of war specifically, has come under renewed scrutiny. Do we live in a rules-based international order, and does law regulate and constrain battlefield behavior? Previous explorations of this controversy have used empirical analysis or jurisprudential investigations. But an illuminating answer to this question may come from an unlikely source—the world of opera. Drawing inspiration from the Italian opera Cavalleria Rusticana, a melodrama about a rural village gripped by seduction, betrayal, and a fatal duel, this Article argues that war is governed by a rustic code of honor, based on norms that are often described as chivalry.
JENS DAVID OHLIN
International Criminal Law ♦ Article
Complementarity and the Normative Structure of International Criminal Law
This Article offers a novel normative justification for complementarity, the principle that governs the basic institutional structure of international criminal law. Under complementarity, the International Criminal Court (and foreign states acting under universal jurisdiction) must initially defer to a state with jurisdiction over the case, stepping in only if the state fails to prosecute. Despite consensus on its importance, scholars have failed to offer a coherent normative justification for the principle of complementarity, raising questions about the legitimacy of the underlying structure of the field.
RYAN LISS
International Arbitration ♦ Note
Calvo, Correísmo, and Consent: The Causes and Consequences of Ecuador’s On-again, Off-again Relationship with ISDS
Ecuador has been the first country to ratify the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID Convention, originally ratified in 1966), subsequently denounce the ICSID Convention (which took effect in 2010), and then ratify it again (in 2021).
ZACH ZAMOFF
Volume 65 ♦ Issue 2 ♦ March 2025
Contemporary International Law ♦ Article
International Law and the Rise of Populism
Contemporary legal scholarship seeks to diagnose populist antagonism towards national and international law and warn about the challenges it poses to the cooperation needed to respond to global threats. What this scholarship overlooks, however, is the role that major shifts in international legal normativity and conceptions of global governance have themselves played in incubating the conditions for the rise of populism.
PETER G. DANCHIN, JEREMY FARRALL, JOLYON FORD, SHRUTI RANA & IMOGEN SAUNDERS
International Conflict and War♦ Article
War’s Rustic Code of Honor
With armed conflict raging all around, international law generally, and the law of war specifically, has come under renewed scrutiny. Do we live in a rules-based international order, and does law regulate and constrain battlefield behavior? Previous explorations of this controversy have used empirical analysis or jurisprudential investigations. But an illuminating answer to this question may come from an unlikely source—the world of opera. Drawing inspiration from the Italian opera Cavalleria Rusticana, a melodrama about a rural village gripped by seduction, betrayal, and a fatal duel, this Article argues that war is governed by a rustic code of honor, based on norms that are often described as chivalry.
JENS DAVID OHLIN
International Criminal Law ♦ Article
Complementarity and the Normative Structure of International Criminal Law
This Article offers a novel normative justification for complementarity, the principle that governs the basic institutional structure of international criminal law. Under complementarity, the International Criminal Court (and foreign states acting under universal jurisdiction) must initially defer to a state with jurisdiction over the case, stepping in only if the state fails to prosecute. Despite consensus on its importance, scholars have failed to offer a coherent normative justification for the principle of complementarity, raising questions about the legitimacy of the underlying structure of the field.
RYAN LISS
International Arbitration ♦ Note
Calvo, Correísmo, and Consent: The Causes and Consequences of Ecuador’s On-again, Off-again Relationship with ISDS
Ecuador has been the first country to ratify the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID Convention, originally ratified in 1966), subsequently denounce the ICSID Convention (which took effect in 2010), and then ratify it again (in 2021).
ZACH ZAMOFF
Volume 65 ♦ Issue 2 ♦ March 2025
International Arbitration ♦ Article
Challenging and Enforcing International Arbitral Awards in U.S. Federal Courts: An Empirical Study
One of the primary reasons why transnational actors prefer international arbitration over international litigation is that they anticipate that those international arbitral awards not voluntarily complied with are highly enforceable in national courts.
CHRISTOPHER R. DRAHOZAL, DONALD EARL CHILDRESS III, JACK J. COE, JR & CATHERINE A. ROGERS
Democracy♦ Article
The Regulation of Foreign Funding of Nonprofits in a Democracy
Governments around the world have increasingly regulated nonprofits’ access to foreign funding. These regulations, which often take the form of registration requirements, are justified as needed to protect a country’s politics from undue foreign influence.
NICK ROBINSON
International Relations ♦ Essay
Territoriality and Admiralty
The concept of territoriality does not appear to fit very well with the limits on state power in admiralty. Territoriality refers to land while admiralty concerns itself with the sea. Limitations on state power on land require adaptation and modification to apply at sea.
GEORGE RUTHERGLEN
International Human Rights Law ♦ Note
Nailing Down the Issue: How Japan’s 2023 Symbolic Reforms Fall Short and How the Japanese Government Can and Should Protect the LGBT Community Through Proactive Lawmaking
2023 appeared to be a historic year for LGBT rights in Japan. The Japanese legislature passed its first law acknowledging the need for understanding of the LGBT community, and the Supreme Court issued two rulings in favor of transgender plaintiffs’ rights. However, upon a closer look, all of this supposed progress is purely symbolic.
CARA SZELES
Domestic Application of International Law ♦ Note
The Brazilian Clean Energy Transition Under WTO Subsidies Law
The public is calling for an energy transition as the consequences of climate change grow increasingly difficult to mitigate. Many states are determined to use government incentives to achieve this transition.
GENEVIEVE MCCARTHY
Volume 65 ♦ Issue 1 ♦ September 2024