International Banking♦ Article
Dollar Challenger? CBDCs, Complexities, and Monetary Hegemony
Digitalization is transforming the architecture of the international monetary system, reshaping how currencies function and financial infrastructures evolve. Among the significant developments are central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)—new digital forms of national currencies. While CBDCs promise benefits such as efficiency, they also generate relational, technological, legal, and governance complexities that would profoundly affect the global financial landscape. Against this backdrop, a compelling question arises: will CBDCs, particularly cross-border CBDCs, challenge U.S. dollar dominance? To address this, this Article adopts a forward-looking approach to examine three interrelated crucial questions: what makes CBDCs complex? What governance complexity is likely to arise? Will CBDCs challenge dollar dominance?
Heng Wang
International Criminal Law♦ Article
Performing Publicity: Secrecy and Transparency in International Criminal Judgments
International courts place a priority on rendering public judgment. Often their statutes require them to make judgments public. More generally, these courts rely on publicity for their authority—but they also rely, more than any other court system, on secrecy for their effectiveness. So how do these courts deal with the consequences of their own reliance on secrecy when rendering final judgment? This Article examines the complete corpus of final judgments from all the principal modern international criminal tribunals, deducing evidence of their classification, redactions in their text, and other indications of secrecy in their construction.
Gianluca Pantaleo & Timothy William Waters
Enforcement and Accountability in International Law♦ Note
Break International Law to Save It: Never Extradite Former U.S. Officials
The actions of the Trump Administration appear consistently at odds with international law. Threats of aggression against Greenland and the initial refoulement of Kilmar Abrego Garcia are only a few examples. Further violations of international law may be forthcoming, but there is a constitutional end date to this struggle—January 20, 2029. After that day, partisans and international law purists will want a future presidential administration to hold these officials accountable. A foreign country could charge and request the extradition of these now-former officials for a crime under its criminal code that an international treaty also covers (e.g., torture). If procedural requirements are met for the extradition, should a future U.S. presidential administration honor the request? Using a politically salient hypothetical involving Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, this Note argues that the U.S. government, irrespective of political party, should always uphold the functional immunity of former U.S. officials even if doing so would violate international law.
Neil J. Noronha
Volume 66 ♦ Issue 3 ♦ Spring 2026
Contemporary International Law♦ Symposium
Celebrating 75 Years of International Law Symposia at UVA Law
On February 24, 2026, the Virginia Journal of International Law and the John Basset Moore Society of International Law hosted their 75th Annual International Law Symposium. To mark this milestone in the dialogue and debate within international law, VJIL invited US. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer ’07 to deliver the keynote. Following the keynote, Ambassador Greer and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former California Supreme Court Justice, sat down to discuss tariffs and the current state of international trade law. In celebration of VJIL’s 75th Annual International Law Symposium, we are pleased to publish Ambassador Greer’s keynote with the permission of the Executive Office of the President, alongside a rebuttal from Cuéllar and a response from Professor Tim Meyer. In addition to our continued publication of cutting-edge international law scholarship, we hope this three-part exchange highlights the importance of rigorous dialogue at a time of increasing polarization and divisiveness. We hope you enjoy.
Technology and Cyber♦ Article
Personal Data as a Dual-Use Technology: Critically Assessing the New Alliance of Privacy and National Security
In the recent past, particularly since early 2024, national security has been used as the rationale for multiple significant U.S. legal measures to limit the transfer of data about individuals to so-called “countries of concern,” especially China. This Article is the first to consider these legal measures as a unified topic—in each of them, personal data is being treated for the first time in U.S. law as a “dual-use” technology that has both military and civilian applications.
Peter Swire & Samm Sacks