Though stay-at-home orders kept us from campus, McGeorge faculty and students remained engaged with the world – with forward-looking international and comparative law scholarship, impactful involvement in transnational policymaking and pedagogy, active leadership in professional organizations, and events that advanced the conversation about urgent global issues. Read on for more from our eventful year!
— Professors Jarrod Wong & Omar M. Dajani
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Cutting-edge international and comparative law scholarship |
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Distinguished Professor Brian Slocum and Professor Jarrod Wong offer the first sustained interdisciplinary critique of international law's ordinary meaning standard in The Vienna Convention and Ordinary Meaning in International Law, 46 YALE J. INT’L L. 191 (2021). They argue that the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties leaves judicial interpretive discretion unconstrained because it does not meaningfully restrict the allowable sources of meaning or how those sources can be used. Instead, VCLT permits courts to engage in speculative, unregulated inferences about purpose and leaves them free to determine whether implied meanings that transcend explicit treaty language should be recognized, even when those subject to the treaty come from different cultures and may speak the language of the treaty as a second language. In Best Evidence Rule, MAX PLANCK ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INTERNATIONAL PROCEDURAL LAW (forthcoming 2022), Wong analyzes the “best evidence rule” as interpreted and applied in the practice of international courts and tribunals.
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Professor Omar M. Dajani’s co-edited volume, FEDERALISM AND DECENTRALIZATION IN THE CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA (Cambridge University Press, 2022, forthcoming) (with Aslı Bâli) is the first scholarly work in the English language to offer a comparative assessment of the law and politics of decentralized governance in the MENA region. The book presents a series of 11 case studies examining the experience across the region, along with a collection of essays by leading scholars that place it in comparative and theoretical perspective. A synthetic conclusion by Dajani and Bâli offers a new typology of drivers of decentralization, argues that the region is the site, for better and worse, of novel approaches to decentralized governance, and explores the processes and instruments through which they have been given effect and the obstacles to their realization. Dajani also contributed to a case study in the volume. In Stuck Together? Can a Two-State Confederation End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? (with Dahlia Scheindlin), he places confederation, as an institutional form, in historical and theoretical context and explores process and institutional design considerations presented by confederation as a framework for conflict resolution in Isreal-Palestine.
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Jay Mootz' interdisciplinary scholarship explores contemporary European philosophy, rhetoric, and law in comparative perspective. His chapter, “Gadamer and Jurisprudence” has been published in The Gadamerian Mind 364-75 (Theodore D. George and Gert-Jan van der Heiden, eds.; Routledge Publishing, 2021). His chapter “The Unbearable Between-ness of Law,” is being published in Reading Ricoeur through Law (Marc de Leeu, George H. Taylor, and Eileen Brennan, eds.; Lexington Books). His chapter, “Jan Broekman and the Multicultural Self,” a solicited contribution to a Festschrift honoring Professor Jan Broekman, will be published by Springer in a book series devoted to Visual Jurisprudence.
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Michael P. Malloy's fifth of five supplements to Banking Law and Regulation were published in October 2021 by international publisher Wolters Kluwer. The supplements provide new and updated legislative, regulatory, and case law developments in financial services regulation. Malloy's three-volume treatise and its previous editions have been in print for more than 30 years and remain a key source on financial services regulation for courts, attorneys, and scholars.
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Distinguished Professor Stephen McCaffrey is scheduled to appear on April 1, 2022, as counsel to Chile before the International Court of Justice in a dispute with Bolivia. He also delivered a series of lectures entitled, “The Evolution of the Law of International Watercourses” this summer for The Hague Academy of International Law. The lectures, which in non-Covid times would have been delivered at the Peace Palace in The Hague, were offered in an online format. A version of the lectures will be published by the Hague Academy.
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Omar M. Dajani worked this summer with a team of researchers led by Israel’s former Minister of Justice, Yossi Beilin, to develop a detailed framework for an Israeli-Palestinian confederation. The study, including Dajani’s chapter on exit from the confederation, will be published in 2022 by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. In May, Dajani was among the contributors to a webinar organized by the International Bar Association entitled “Legal Analysis of the Ongoing Conflict between Israel and Palestine.” Dajani also spoke to the World Affairs Council of Marin County on the so-called “Abraham Accords” between Israel and a number of Arab states in December 2020 and was featured in an online “conversatory” entitled “Rethinking the Future of Israel/Palestine: Between Two States and One,” hosted by the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco in August 2021.
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Jarrod Wong serves as the American Society of International Law (ASIL) observer delegate to the United Nations Commission of International Trade Law, Working Group III, on Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) reform. With state representatives and delegates across the world, the Group is embarked on a historic multi-year project to reform ISDS by identifying procedural and structural concerns with ISDS, including inconsistent arbitral outcomes, duration and cost, and third-party funding. Wong also served on ASIL’s Executive Committee and co-chaired the 114th, and inaugural virtual, Annual Meeting of the (ASIL). A record number of registrants (more than 2,000) signed up for the meeting, which featured more than 200 experts speaking on a broad range of international law issues.
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Michael P. Malloy served on the organizing committee for the 18th Annual International Conference on Law in Athens, Greece, sponsored by the Athens Institute for Education and Research in mid-July 2021, and delivered a presentation, “Encountering Charles Dickens: The Lawyer’s Muse,” which will appear in a Proceedings volume published by the Institute.
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In April 2021, McGeorge’s Global Center convened their symposium entitled Rethinking International Law for the Age of the Anthropocene online. The symposium examined how international law can meet the challenges presented by the climate crisis, potential mass extinctions, and other threats to the planetary ecosystem and address the consequences of environmental degradation, including the decrease of habitable lands and the mass migration of those displaced by it. Speakers included: Nicholas Bryner; Eric Biber; Tseming Yang; Daniel Magraw and Dafne Carletti; Carmen Gonzales; Patricia Galvão Ferreira; Rachael Salcido; David Takacs; and Stephen McCaffrey.
In August 2021, McGeorge sponsored the first-ever Zoom panel of the International Contracts Conference (KCon), hosted by Professor Michael P. Malloy. This is the third time McGeorge has hosted KCon. The speakers were Professor Robert Brain, on The Influence of EU Regulation on Twenty-First Century Contracting as Viewed through Videogame End User Agreements; Assistant Professor Daniel Croxall, on How State Legislatures Make It Nearly Impossible for a Brewer to Terminate a Distribution Contract; Professor Kate Vitasek, on What is New about the New Economy and How Contracts Can Adapt; and, Professor Malloy, on Contracts and Economic Sanctions. The University of the Pacific Law Review will be publishing the papers presented during the conference.
In January 2021, the Global Center convened a lively panel discussion on Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam and the Future of the Nile Basin, featuring Professor Stephen McCaffrey, Mohamed Helal of Egypt, and Mahemud Tekuya of Ethiopia.
As a means of connecting our community with lawyers doing important and innovative work in a variety of international fields, the Global Center also convened monthly dialogues via Zoom in what we dubbed Conversations with Badass International Lawyers. Featured guests included: Stephanie Koury, who as Principal Political Affairs Officer/Chief of Staff for the UN Office of the Special Coordinator for Lebanon (UNSCOL) was involved in crafting the international response to the political crisis in Lebanon; David Kaye, who just completed his term as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression; Diala Shamas, who is a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she works on challenging government and law enforcement abuses perpetrated under the guise of national security, both in the U.S. and abroad; and Serena Hoy, who was serving in the Office of Legal Affairs at INTERPOL.
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McGeorge will once again convene a virtual International Programs Breakfast during the 2022 Annual Meeting of the International Associations of Law Schools. Stay tuned for details!
The Global Center’s Spring 2022 Symposium will explore Antisemitism, Israel-Palestine Advocacy and Freedom of Speech.
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