Abstract In his article entitled ‘Statehood and International Organization: Rethinking Their Conceptual Relationship with Reference to Customary International Law’, Orfeas Chasapis Tassinis aims to reconceptualize how international organizations relate to the ‘outside world’ with a focus on the applicability and formation of customary international law. This reply challenges his dismissal of some of the established ways of thinking about international organizations, including the use of analogies with states and corporations. The reply argues that those established ways are largely capable of reaching the same results as Chasapis Tassinis’ framework. Although the use of analogies has clear limitations, it can explain why international organizations are bound by customary international law in the same way as states. In fact, by characterizing international organizations in terms of political communities, Chasapis Tassinis’ framework inevitably has an internal focus, which has limited added value in explaining which customary international law applies to them in their external relations. A look behind the corporate veil of international organizations may be necessary to determine how they contribute to the formation of custom. However, by suggesting that the practice of organs composed of member states should only count as state practice, the article risks undermining the distinct will of international organizations, which is the crucial condition for their international legal personality.

Abstract Here, yet again, is my pick of ‘good reads’ from the books I read in 2025. I want to remind you, as I do every year, that these are not ‘book reviews’, which also explains the relative paucity of law books or books about the law. Many excellent ones have come my way this year, as in previous years, but an excellent law book is not always, in fact rarely is, a ‘good read’ in the sense intended here: curl up on the sofa and enjoy a very good read, maybe even as a respite from an excellent law book. I usually point out that some of these ‘good reads’ are not necessarily literary masterpieces – though in the list this year each recommendation is for a book which in my eyes is a lot more than a ‘mere’ good read; a handful are truly masterpieces. A lot more than 10 good reads came my way this year. The selection process was tougher than usual. I was guided by my possibly misguided notion of trying to provide titles which would cater for very different tastes. I myself am hopelessly eclectic.

Abstract Environmental lawyers have devoted little attention to their discipline’s past, and when they have done so, they have often narrated the past as showing that the field is becoming progressively more self-aware and sophisticated so as to reach its present stage of maturity. In this article, we trace a somewhat different course. We follow the emergence of the field from the 1950s to its eventual collapse into ‘sustainable development’. To do this, we examine the processes that created and shaped its boundaries in such a way that it gradually came to see itself as a specific type of professional project with a blueprint for international legal reform. We examine the way in which topics became included in and excluded from the field. And we focus especially on the diplomatic, professional and academic tensions that shaped the field and eventually led it from its early environmentalist orientation to its present-day efforts to engage with wider issues of social development and international justice.

Abstract We inhabit a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – in which humans are the major force affecting the Earth System, with potentially catastrophic results. We also live in a kaleidoscopic world with many actors, in addition to states, many different legal instruments and abrupt, rapid changes in issues and coalitions. Increasingly, we face problems of commons and public goods at multiple geographical levels. This is the reality that international environmental law now must govern. While this body of law has had certain successes in the last half-century, progress in many areas has been incremental. As this article argues, international environmental law must undergo transformational change that takes account of these critical changes in the global context, reconsiders the adequacy of legacy legal structures and treats the Earth as a holistic system with humanity as an integral part. Specifically, it needs to overcome five disconnects: (i) between the narrow anthropocentric scope of legal frameworks and the integrated character of the Earth System; (ii) between the siloed and ad hoc approach to individual environmental problems and their integrated connection in the Earth System; (iii) between the legal need for certainty and the inherent uncertainties and changes in the relevant science; (iv) between the legal prioritization of the present generation and the needs of future generations; and (v) between the theoretical recognition of the rights of marginalized and vulnerable communities and indigenous peoples in sustainable development and their practical exclusion from participation and justice.

Abstract A reader examining a contemporary account of international environmental law 20, 30 or 50 years from now may be interested not only in its accuracy but also in what the account conveys of our own generational perception of our past. By then, several features will have become evident to that reader, which our generation missed or under-estimated. One above all is likely to connect our and their perception of what international environmental law had to face: humanity, through its production and consumption processes, is changing not only human history but also the dynamics of the entire Earth System in what some see as a new geological epoch defined by humans, the ‘Anthropocene’. This major fact is and will remain with us, and the extent to which it can be addressed depends on whether we see it and integrate it in our policies. This article argues that such is not the case of the social practice we call international environmental law, and this is, above all, for a very specific reason: international environmental law is built around an asymmetry between the legal organization of production and consumption processes – the ‘transaction’ – and the regulation of their side effects or ‘negative externalities’. At the core of international environmental law lies a deliberate effort to preserve legal space for the transaction – the very processes that led us into the Anthropocene – while aiming to minimize its negative side effects for the global environment. It is an odd mismatch, akin to a legal requirement to keep the dam gates open while also requiring that the flooded areas be kept as dry as possible. International environmental law is faced with impacts affecting the geological timescale, but it is structured to preserve the cause of the problem and focus on side effects unfolding in a human timescale.

Abstract This symposium assesses the evolution – or, more neutrally, the trajectory – of international law as it relates to the environment in the last half-century. In the decades since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and until 2025, a watershed for climate litigation (but for little else), the development-environment equation that haunts every environmental negotiation, every instrument and much of the case-law became only more polarized. In this introductory article, I discuss three main aspects of this assessment, as they arise from the contributions to this symposium: (i) the case for reconsidering the overall retrospective narrative of international environmental law; (ii) the possible reasons explaining its inability to address humanity’s geological impact; and (iii) the role of international law in relation to the balancing of the terms of the development-environment equation. The purpose is not descriptive; it is analytical, and sometimes critical. It is an effort to provide the context that is most relevant for an understanding of these contributions.

Abstract The European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) judgment in KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland represents a critical juncture in climate litigation. By endorsing a national carbon budget in combination with an extraterritorial, consumption-based approach to state responsibility, while sidestepping the contentious issues of carbon offsets and removals, I show how the Court has created an implementation paradox. The judgment cannot be implemented in a meaningful way in a context where Switzerland’s fair-share carbon budget is already exhausted and negative, and where it is almost exhausted if we adopt a per capita approach. A negative fair-share carbon budget would entail an ‘emergency brake’, which no state can afford. A still remaining positive per capita carbon budget would require unprecedented emission reduction rates far beyond the temporality of economic lockdowns imposed during COVID-19. The judgment thus highlights the limits of climate litigation against states at a time of exhausted carbon budgets and an over-reliance on questionable carbon offsets and highly speculative carbon removal promises.

Abstract Could international law contribute to interstate maritime conflicts? A close tracing of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) policies in the South China Sea suggests so. China’s early interactions with the emerging maritime legal order in the 1970s expanded the scope of its interests from disputed island territories to comprehensive jurisdiction over vast swathes of maritime space. Ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1996 prompted Beijing to develop new bureaucratic and enforcement capabilities designed to realize sweeping claims inspired by, though not limited to, UNCLOS entitlements. When these capabilities came to fruition in the mid-2000s, they enabled a sustained, increasingly coercive push for control over the PRC’s maritime periphery, which has continued to the present. Four representative cases of China’s new and ongoing patterns of behaviour demonstrate in specific detail how China’s interactions with the legal regime have contributed to its confrontational on-water behaviour. In short, the PRC’s campaign to control vast swathes of East Asian maritime space was rooted in the party-state’s internalization of concepts of maritime rights through the UNCLOS process, coupled with a rejection of its corresponding limitations.

Abstract International tax law, as an academic field, is traditionally viewed as lying outside the broader discipline of international law. This makes international tax law an interesting case for exploring the disciplinary boundaries of international law and their manifestations. This article argues that the apparent separation between international tax law and international law can be linked to a series of choices made by international law scholars and international tax law scholars in the 20th century that contributed to the compartmentalization of the two scholarly communities. By shedding light on such a compartmentalization, this article hopes to encourage more dialogue between today’s international law and international tax law scholars. If social dynamics indeed play a key role in the emergence of subfields of international law, then such a dialogue could lead to a rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries of international law.

Abstract Susan Marks’ insightful and wide-ranging Foreword invites readers to reconsider the meaning of families and the circulation of familial discourse in and about international law. Marks argues that familial rhetoric, though multiple and multi-vectoral, lends itself to both naturalization and sentimentalization, and that ‘family figurations in international discourse’ are especially apt to legitimate structures of exploitation and exclusion (or inclusion, though on violent, intrusive or simply unsatisfying terms). This Afterword revisits Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ critique of the bourgeois family form, demonstrating that neither was an ‘abolitionist’ of families in general and that both maintained that what would follow the social transformations required to overcome capitalism could not be predicted in advance. It concludes by suggesting that it is just as possible that the future will bring forth new forms of families as it is that it will engender no families at all, on the international plane as elsewhere.