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Richard Schmalbeck and Irma Johanna Mosquera Valderrama

This course is an introduction to international income taxation of business transactions. After a brief explanation of basic income tax concepts, the principal rules of taxation relating to international business will be examined. The course will then focus on how the United States’ rules interact with taxation systems in other countries, exploring the concepts of source of income and residence of the taxpayer, and their role in the tax rules relating to international trade. The second term of the course will focus on bilateral tax treaties as a means of promoting crossborder investments and international trade through the avoidance of international double taxation. The OECD model treaty will be examined as an illustration of the interaction between double tax treaties and domestic regulations. Finally, the course will explore recent developments in the international effort to reduce tax-base erosion and income shifting among taxing jurisdictions.

Helen Duffy and Jayne Huckerby

This course provides a framework for understanding strategic human rights litigation and advocacy, assessing its limitations and challenges, as well as positive impacts. As advocates around the globe increasingly resort to litigation and advocacy—in national, regional, and international courts and/or forums—to protect and promote human rights, this course will explore what difference this litigation and advocacy makes in the real world, when and why.  It will grapple with the legal, strategic, and other choices that are made around issues such as which rights’ violations to focus on in a given context; how to frame rights’ claims; where to lodge claims and choice of forum; building the evidence-base for claims (e.g., through fact-finding); remedies sought; and the ways in which strategic litigation and advocacy feature a range of human rights methodologies (e.g., documentation and messaging). The course will examine the multiple actors against whom strategic human rights litigation and advocacy is directed, from governments to non-State actors (e.g., corporations), to inter-governmental actors (e.g., the United Nations), considering how these different targets affect the legal claims and forums available to advocates.  Issues ranging from the role of social movements, victims, and their representatives, in human rights litigation and advocacy to the challenges in the enforceability of judgments, will also be addressed.  This course will draw heavily on case studies to illustrate these issues and to provide insight into the broader question of how to assess and enhance the effectiveness of strategic human rights litigation and advocacy in the future.

Rachel Brewster and Giovanni Gruni

This course will explore how trade relations between states are negotiated and governed in regional and multilateral institutions.  The course highlights the pluralistic and overlapping structure of modern international trade law where dozens of preferential trade agreements supplement and compete with the WTO's multilateral trade rules.  The course will focus on two specific challenges to the international trade system: resolving disputes over trade agreements and negotiating food security concerns.  The first half of the course focuses on how states resolve disputes once agreements have been negotiated.  Topics include who has standing to bring claims, the remedies available when breaches occur, and how to manage similar and competing claims in different institutional fora.  It will also examine a range of possible mechanisms to enforce agreements, including retaliation, monetary penalties, voluntary financial compensation, and renegotiation.  In the second half, the course will explore how shifting food prices can leave vulnerable populations without access to sufficient food resources and how regional and multilateral agreements have separately addressed such food security concerns.  This part of the course examines how specific trade policy tools, such as subsidies, export restrictions, and stockpiling regimes, are negotiated between governments and affect the availability of food resources. 

Pinar Ölçer and James Coleman

This course will use comparative law methodology to examine contemporary criminal justice issues, including over criminalization, corporate criminal liability, prosecutorial discretion, and bribery and corruption.  The course materials will explore how the U.S. system and other national systems respond to contemporary challenges.  Readings also will consider how over-arching norms are transposed within supranational and international frameworks and down to national and subnational governments, from Europe to the United States (and vice versa) and back up to international treaties.  Deeply and intricately tied into local legal frameworks and realities, criminal and criminal procedural law concerns an area of positive law in which it is famously difficult to gain consensus, even within one national sphere.  Thus, what behavior should be criminalized, how law enforcement should be arranged, what constitutes fairness and just punishment all concern sensitive issues in the context of which “sharing” law can be difficult.  Nevertheless, a great deal of “borrowing” or diffusion of law does take place, either informally or formally via international and supranational treaties or joint law enforcement efforts, in order to effectively combat crimes which are held to endanger international and transnational interests.  Adopting similar rules – either by conscious decision or informal (judicial or executive) borrowing – does not always mean however that transplanted law will work, or work in the same manner in every environment, where contextual factors may have an impact on the way in which the law operates.  By turning to distinct substantive and procedural themes within the domain of criminal justice, the aim is to gain understanding of the manner in which this type of law can be transposed to different contexts, what types of bottlenecks can be encountered therein and how issues of transposition can and should be dealt with.

Tom Metzloff and Deborah DeMott

This course is intended to provide an introduction to essential elements of the American legal system. Emphasis will be placed on exploring contemporary problems that reveal key issues and concerns within the American legal system. The first part of the course will focus on constitutional law, and will consider the role that United States Supreme Court plays in interpreting and applying key aspects of the Constitution. Specific topics will include a focus on recent Supreme Court cases involving affirmative action, gun control, and privacy rights, as well as a series of issues involving the First Amendment. The second part of the course will shift to the development of private law and its relationships to legislation and regulation. It will focus in particular on a distinctive portion of contemporary tort law: liability when a defective product causes injury, whether to the purchaser or someone else. We will examine cases testing the boundaries between contract and tort law and liability issues when a product is sold through an online platform, among others.

Carsten Stahn and Laurence Helfer

There are two dozen international courts (ICs) in operation today with jurisdictions covering a broad array of subjects. ICs have issued myriad rulings on issues including the conduct of individuals during armed conflicts, respect for human rights, the legality of trade restrictions, territorial claims in the oceans and on land, and the protection of health, safety, and the environment. How have ICs established and maintained their authority and their legitimacy?  Do different institutional design features—such as jurisdictional provisions, access rules, and standing requirements—affect whether ICs are effective in changing the behavior of states? What role do lawyers, national judges, and NGOs play in filing cases and promoting compliance with international judicial rulings? And what are the risks of backlash against ICs that overreach?  This course explores these questions through a comparative analysis of global and regional ICs.  Students will be exposed to different theoretical perspectives on international adjudication and to the decisions of a range of judicial bodies, including the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, human rights courts in Africa, the Americas and Europe, and regional economic integration courts.  More generally, the course analyzes the opportunities and challenges associated with building an effective system of adjudication in international law.