Filling the Justice Capacity Gap

The worlds justice systems are under stress. Political commitments to democratization and human rights protection, private economic transactions, counterterrorism, and globalization impose new burdens on justice institutions for more impartial and transparent conflict resolution. The intrinsic need of a modern state to be both strong and self-limiting requires a strong and independent judiciary to realize these ruleof- law objectives

Local Mediation in Advance of Armed Conflict

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Reflections on Reform: Considering Legal Foundations for Peace and Prosperity in the Middle East

reflections on refor

Fighting Corruption: Identifying Foundational Obstacles and New Directions

Exploring the conceptual and practical weaknesses of efforts to combat corruption is not enough. The identification of obstacles alone, however useful in itself, would be insufficiently responsive to the considerable challenge of anti-corruption reform. This article takes stock of foundational obstacles and offers some novel directions forward on legal, theoretical, and political levels of reform

An Interpretive Theory of International Law: The Distinction Between Treaty and Customary Law

The author begins with an explanation of the importance of the distinction between treaty and customary law. The author then presents six alternative principles currently used to inform that distinction (dichotomy, overlap, relativity, interdependence, equivalence, and indeterminacy) and evaluates the application of these principles according to their theoretical coherence, practicability, reconcilability, and resolving power. The author concludes that each of the alternative principles is unsatisfactory in at least one respect and proposes a superior interpretive approach that does not define customary law in terms of treaty, but rather according to its own independently defining attributes. Finally, the author suggests that this approach, called sub-referential threshold relativity (STR), may be applied to other key distinctions in legal doctrine and scholarship