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Jayne Huckerby and Sophie Starrenburg

International human rights law and its institutions provide sites of opportunity, contestation, and controversy. With questions about the legitimacy and efficacy of international human rights law, institutions, and practice on the rise, this course focuses on assessing both the current opportunities and challenges of guaranteeing protections using international human rights. The course engages with a range of human rights issues, methodologies, institutions, and law, to consider core questions about the international human rights regime, such as its ability to address key actors beyond the State, adequately balance competing rights’ claims, and provide remedies for rights’ violations. The first half of the course will focus on the international human rights legal framework, including the nine core human rights treaties and associated institutional arrangements. It will address a range of actors in global governance on human rights (including non-State actors) and use thematic case studies as a lens for developing core understandings about the content of international human rights law, as well as how it works in practice. The second half of the course will then pivot to how claims of universality are mediated through regional human rights systems, stretched across borders through doctrines of extraterritorial application, and increasingly mobilized to address collective interests and global challenges. This part of the course explores participation and procedural rights, cultural and collective dimensions of human rights, and the growing role of human rights law in responding to climate change. Together, these sessions invite students to critically reflect on the future direction of human rights within public international law.

Rachel Brewster and Anna Marhold

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 sustainable development, climate change and energy concerns. 

The first half of the course will focus on the regulation of the interlinked thematic issues of sustainable development, climate change and energy regulation and assess their role in the multilateral trading system. It will explore whether the WTO legal framework facilitates or constrains the advancement of sustainable development and higher environmental standards by, inter alia, looking at the phase-out of environmentally harmful fossil fuel subsidies and discussing the role of labeling schemes. It will also look at developments at the plurilateral level, by, amongst others, studying the Trade and Sustainable Development Chapters in EU Free Trade Agreements.

The second 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.

Jason Rudall and Casey Thomson

The first half of this course takes aim at the legal framework that seeks to govern foreign direct investment, mapping its fundamental principles, understanding the content of key rules, and placing an emphasis on how this field intersects with non-investment concerns like the environment and human rights. After exploring whether the promotion of foreign direct investment promotes development in host countries, we will evaluate some of the criticism that has been levelled at investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Indeed, foreign direct investment and its accompanying legal framework have been touted as both a cause and a cure for a range of human rights issues, social injustices and environmental degradation, particularly in developing countries. We will critically appraise how sustainable development and non-investment concerns more generally are being addressed by new generation investment treaties and the recent awards of ISDS tribunals, as well as reform that is currently underway in this field.

The second half of this course will focus on alternative methods of international dispute resolution, including negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. Using case studies and experiential exercises, we will explore the unique challenges that arise when negotiating and enforcing international agreements, including the impact that culture can have on reaching agreement. We will examine The Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (the New York Convention), including its utility in connection with the enforcement of international agreements and best practices for designing arbitration provisions that will require the parties to rely on the Convention for enforcement. Finally, we will engage in a comparative analysis of the practice of mediation in different regions, and the challenges this has created for the adoption and implementation of the more recent United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements resulting from Mediation (the Singapore Convention on Mediation).

Daniëlla Dam-de Jong and Tim Meyer

This class explores international environmental law, one of the fastest growing fields of international cooperation. In 1972, there were only a smattering of international environmental treaties. Today, hundreds of agreements have been negotiated, covering such diverse topics as acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer, climate change, protection of biological diversity, desertification, and transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and chemicals. The first half of the course will provide a general introduction to the basic concepts and mechanisms of international environmental law, focusing on how states negotiate, design, and implement environmental regimes in light of concerns about compliance and effectiveness, using examples drawn from these treaty regimes. The second half of the course will focus on the position of the environment in international law more broadly. Other international legal regimes, such as human rights law, international economic law and international criminal law, have all developed rules that aim to provide protection to the environment. This raises questions about how the environment is conceptualized in these regimes and how they interact with international environmental law.

Christopher Buccafusco and David Schwartz

This course will address contemporary issues in international and comparative intellectual property law, including copyrights, patents, trademarks, and design rights. Students will learn about the various treaties that govern international IP law, including the Berne Convention, the TRIPS Agreement, and the Patent Cooperation Treaty. They will also explore how the law in these areas regulate innovation and international trade. Other aspects of the course will focus on comparative IP law, exploring how the US’s treatment of IP doctrines differs from other countries’.   

Topics in the course will include:

• International treaties covering intellectual property
• Copyright and patent laws’ treatment of artificial intelligence
• Rights in industrial and fashion design
• Geographic indications of origin for wine, food, and other products
• Patents and access to medicines
• Software patents & patentable subject matter
• Unified Patent Court

Students do not need to have taken any IP classes as prerequisites, nor is a scientific or engineering background necessary for the course.