U.S. Approaches to Teaching International Law in a Global Environment

Charlotte Ku

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Chapter 2 U.S. Approaches to Teaching International Law in a Global Environment

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Charlotte Ku

Charlotte Ku
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Pages:: 82–117

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004678880_004

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Abstract

Twenty-first century global issues, including pandemic response and recovery, climate change, and human population movements, can only be successfully addressed by those familiar with the sources, jurisdiction, and dispute resolution mechanisms of international law. This chapter discusses the responsibility of the academy to teach a broad constituency of law students, practitioners, public officials, thought leaders, and citizens. It describes various approaches used by law schools to integrate international law into their curriculum, including transnational, comparative, transsystemic, and classic Westphalian law, and considers ways to remedy the lack of international experience among U.S. law professors. The chapter looks at how law schools and professional associations teach international law, including short, topic-specific continuing legal education to practitioners; moot courts; experiential “global lawyering” visits and internships with international partners and organizations; and required or elective full semester courses as part of the J.D. curriculum. It calls on the “invisible college” of international lawyers to rise to the multifaceted challenge of today’s global environment.

July 2021

International Law in a Globalized Environment¹

On 13 December 2019, I boarded an airplane at London’s Heathrow Airport bound for the United States. I carried with me a copy of the Financial Times that included a small item on the appearance in China of a novel pneumonia-like disease. I took little notice of what seemed to be just a story about another kind of flu – a common occurrence during winter in the northern hemisphere. A month later, on 30 January 2020, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (who) declared the covid-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.² Two months after that, with the spread of the disease to 114 countries and more than 100,000 cases, covid-19 was declared a pandemic by who on 11 March 2020. As the who Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response reported in May 2021, “[i]n under four months from the moment when sars-CoV-2 was first identified as the cause of clusters of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, covid-19 became a global pandemic threatening every country in the world.”³

While its origins remain under investigation, individual actions and reactions on a personal and public level contributed to creating a global pandemic, as they will determine the strength of the post-pandemic recovery. The who Panel noted:

The evidence the Panel gathered showed that decisions mattered and had consequences. It also showed that prior conditions mattered – there was much more freedom to act and more choices available in those places where a robust and resilient health system existed, where social and economic protections were solid, and where governments, scientists and citizens trusted one another to do their best.⁴

The need for a global response in early 2020 clashed with an unwillingness in many countries, including the United States, to take the threat seriously and to act accordingly. Reasons for this reluctance varied from country to country but almost always included reluctance to deal with the impact of shutting down entire economies. the who itself was not immune from pressures to understate the need for swift and decisive action to stop the spread of the disease. At the same time, there was a xenophobic and populist response in some countries, including the United States, that fanned the anger of those who felt harmed and left out by globalization. This anger encouraged them to believe that they could build physical barriers against pernicious and now deadly outside forces. The tenor and technical approach used by the who did little to instill confidence in people directly affected by the disease or address the socio-economic impacts that resulted.⁵ And countries’ “selective imposition of travel and trade restrictions”⁶ did little to stop the spread of the disease in a globalized world. The need for a more holistic approach in managing health crises and policy was noted in the who Independent Panel’s report:

This mega-crisis makes a compelling case for strengthening a true and effective multilateral system which ensures that disease outbreaks do not become pandemics and pandemics are not allowed to escalate into world-wide social, economic, and health crises. … Understanding the political economy of incentives and barriers to international agreement is a vital task that needs to draw on research disciplines much wider than done today.⁷

But knowing what to do did not mean that governments did what was needed. In mid-2021, they are still lagging behind, but there has been some progress. On 20 May 2021, the Council of the European Union approved a decision “to support the launch of negotiations for an international treaty on the fight against pandemics,”⁸ the Framework Convention on Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Negotiations are underway within the World Trade Organization to waive provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (trips) to facilitate worldwide equitable access to covid-19 vaccines. The complex technologies required to produce the vaccine, however, will not make access through manufacturing a quick or easy solution to increase the vaccine supply.⁹ After a year of “going it alone,” including its announced withdrawal from who, the United States, under a new Administration in 2021, reversed its withdrawal announcement and supports this effort.¹⁰ Launched in April 2020, covax is one part of the who’s Access to covid-19 program to ensure access to vaccines for distribution to low and middle income countries,¹¹ and the United States announced the purchase and distribution¹² of 500 million doses of vaccines. The European Union has announced similar donations.¹³

The pandemic exposed the many disconnects in mounting a universal response to a global crisis. If it had been a hypothetical scenario in an academic exercise, it would have demonstrated the role of international law and its functions in a globalized world. Unfortunately, it is all too real, and it has revealed how shallow cooperation remains as countries turned inward to protect themselves. It exposed the urgent need to address myriad inequities and mindsets that made common action even within countries impossible. Countries’ collective failure to cooperate has resulted so far in the disease infecting at least 150 million people and killing more than three million – more than 600,000 in the U.S. alone.¹⁴ No country on the planet was spared “the worst combined health and socioeconomic crisis in living memory, and a catastrophe at every level.”¹⁵ As the who Independent Panel noted, “covid-19 has shown how an infectious disease can sweep the globe in weeks and, in the space of a few months, set back sustainable development by years.”¹⁶

The covid-19 experience will be an enduring part of teaching international law for some time to come. The work needed to repair the damage done by the pandemic and to develop a better response system will rely (among other resources) on the governance infrastructure provided by international law including forms of obligation, concepts that guide the obligations’ implementation, and modes of communication that can direct and motivate action across borders. After World War ii, members of the United Nations thought they had both inherited from the League of Nations and developed an adequate system of specialized agencies and functional organizations to deal with a myriad of issues including global health. In the treaties that established the World Health Organization and subsequent agreements, who member states gave it the authority to respond to global pandemics through legally binding international health regulations.¹⁷ However, as we have seen, this authority was not enough to direct states to discharge their individual and collective responsibility to take actions that might have tempered the spread of the disease. Why not?

Answering this question is critical to ensuring a safe and productive global future. The failures of 2020 laid bare the importance of international law and global governance and of expanding the range of students, practitioners, and citizens who understand what happens when these systems break down. The questions of why we teach international law, to whom it should be taught, when and how, and by whom are more compelling in 2021 than they were in 2018 when I delivered portions of this chapter as a conference paper in Innsbruck, Austria on teaching international law.

Equally compelling is the need to understand the environment in which international law functions. As we saw in the covid-19 response, substantial portions of the response structure seemed not “fit for purpose.” How can we teach in a relevant way to those who unexpectedly may find themselves at the front lines of a global challenge requiring collective, orderly, and concerted action? What is the purpose of such teaching? If we say international law now operates in a global environment, what does that mean in concrete terms?

Classic international law focused on horizontal state to state relations covering such topics as recognition, state responsibility, diplomatic immunity, and regulation of armed conflict. The global environment – facilitated by international law itself – pushed international law into a vertical plane now reaching into a state’s domestic legal system down to the local level. As Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr of Freetown, Sierra Leone, said of local officials dealing with the pandemic, “You are first in the response, but often last in the queue for policy formation” to better address the realities on the ground.¹⁸ Cross-border commercial and personal transactions have introduced new private actors into an international sphere that had previously been the virtually exclusive domain of public officials. Issues like environmental protection engage jurisdictions at multiple levels, including water authorities and municipalities. States are held accountable by other states to international human rights standards for their treatment of those under their jurisdiction. Even in the core international law area of state responsibility, attributing that responsibility may require moving through differing levels of jurisdictions and sectors. This means that international law is no longer the exclusive province of diplomats and foreign ministries, but involves individuals in multiple sectors at multiple levels.

This chapter will explore the multiple and varied audiences we need to reach in international law teaching; the opportunities for such teaching; what our teaching should accomplish; and who will do the teaching. Our audiences include:

1)Students, both undergraduate and professional;
2)Practitioners;
3)Public officials from all levels of government including municipalities;
4)Members of the general public who, as individuals, are subjects of international law, and who, as participants in their respective political processes, affect their governments’ commitment to international obligations.

The teaching methods we use and the content we deliver must vary from audience to audience. Table 1 summarizes this information and discussion.

Table 1

Teaching international law

To Whom	Why	What	When	How	By Whom
Students (Undergraduate)	Essential part of general education	Basic knowledge	Prior to graduation	Classroom; formal interaction with instructor	Academics: local
Students (Professional)	Needed for professional competence and advantage	Basic knowledge; possible focus on how il interacts with domestic law	Prior to graduation	Classroom: short course or full semester; experiential	Academics, practitioners, officials: local and international
Practitioners	Needed for professional competence and advantage	Updates or basic knowledge	Ongoing throughout professional life	Short courses and professional meetings; through professional associations or standalone	Academics, practitioners, officials: local and international
Public Officials	Needed for professional competence	Updates or basic knowledge	Ongoing throughout professional life	Short courses or professional meetings; through professional associations or standalone	Academics, practitioners, officials: local and international
General Public	Needed for sounder politics and public decision-making	General understanding	Ongoing as part of democratic political process	Social media and other forms of public discourse	Academics, practitioners, occasionally officials: local and occasionally international

This chapter will look into who is teaching international law in the United States and whether the U.S. international law academy is, in fact, globally minded. It will conclude with some suggestions on how to tackle the multifaceted challenge of teaching international law in a post-covid-19 global world.

What Will the Post-covid-19 World Be Like?

In 1919 and 1945, the victorious allies of World War i and World War ii were conscious that the postwar era would be, and must be, different in its approach to interstate relations than had been the case before 1914 and in what had been the interwar years, 1919–39. They created a new organization, the League of Nations, in the wake of the Great War of 1914–18; and in 1945, they tried to rectify the failures of the League in the structure and tasks of the new United Nations.

In 2021, the world is again at such a moment, when, despite many successes over the past 75 years, the weaknesses and failures of the post-1945 UN system, specifically of who, and the distrust and disinterest in international cooperation of many citizens of democracies worldwide have been revealed. We who are on the front lines of teaching international law must understand “teaching” in the broadest sense, not just of students in a formal academic setting, but as education offered in layman’s language to create an informed understanding of the nature of the global environment in the twenty-first century. We must start with the basics.

Global signifies the shrinkage of time and space. A single event in an isolated location such as the eruption of a volcano or the emergence of a new pathogen can have worldwide consequences. The volume and pace of such occurrences with global consequences are increasing as larger numbers of people, goods, and transactions cross and re-cross multiple borders – now including cyber-borders. Although states have facilitated much of this activity by concluding trade and other agreements that have resulted in more open access, borders remain important for law enforcement, regulation, and dispute resolution. The speed with which countries and local jurisdictions within countries closed their borders in response to the pandemic was noteworthy. Not only are multiple types of legal persons now present alongside states and public international institutions in the global arena, but they also perform authoritative actions that shape the form and content of domestic law in specific areas.

Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal provide evidence for this development in their studies of regulation and governance. They noted the proliferation of multinational enterprises, firms, and non-governmental organizations that have appeared in the regulatory and governance space, seeming to supplant the state as the primary regulator. Yet, Abbott and Snidal conclude that:

the state is not becoming obsolete as a regulator, either domestically or internationally. Instead, in both settings its role is evolving, from the centralized mandatory regulator of tradition (and to some extent of myth) to a more subtle role as catalyst, coordinator, and supporter of diverse regulatory activities.¹⁹

The state reserves its power to regulate should non-state action fail to ensure adequate order or protection. State institutions, particularly courts, may also serve as places of last resort should conflicts or disputes arise. Nevertheless, the political and regulatory environment of today’s global world is more complex than its equivalent at the end of World War ii. International law is part of this complexity and international law teaching needs to equip our students for work in this environment.

The changes in what constitutes international law’s content are reflected in succeeding editions of leading treatises. Taking just one example, Oppenheim’s International Law, we can see this development. The first edition published in 1905 focused on issues related almost exclusively to states and their activities, with only a small section titled “unions concerning non-political interests.”²⁰ By the third edition in 1920, a separate section was added for the League of Nations.²¹ The 1952–55 edition was further lengthened under the heading of “The Legal Organisation of the International Community.”²² This edition also included a new section on individual human rights. In 2017, two stand-alone volumes, Oppenheim’s International Law: United Nations were published to supplement the basic treatise.²³

If one of international law’s purposes is to provide a structure for authoritative decision-making, then the pool of decision-makers today has expanded beyond government and public officials. Individual experts and activists in non-governmental organizations can now function as authoritative decision-makers.²⁴ Having technical experts set standards and procedures can be effective, particularly when they also have the responsibility of implementing the standards. However, as we have seen from the covid-19 experience, who’s technical knowledge and effort to coordinate national actors were not adequate to address the crisis, absent political cooperation at multiple levels among and within them.²⁵ Actions taken in response to a crisis without structure or adequate authority raise questions of accountability and responsibility. The power to decide carries with it the responsibility for the consequences of those decisions, including the ability to remedy any wrongs that may result.

When governments act and damage is done, it is clear whom to hold responsible. When a corporation, an ngo or an international organization acts in a way that harms, the remedy for that harm is less clear. But when others like the United Nations (UN) causes harm, the situation is more complicated. Consider, for example, the effort to claim damages from the UN on behalf of the nearly one million Haitians who suffered, and the 10,000 who died, from cholera, brought to Haiti in 2010 by UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal. The class action lawsuits filed in the U.S. in 2013 were dismissed in 2017 because of the immunity under the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations that the UN enjoys in the United States.²⁶ In an effort to provide some compensation to the victims, the UN started a voluntary trust fund with contributions from states and private entities, but the fund remains small.²⁷ Another example of the complexity of seeking relief from damages done by UN operations is outlined in the 2019 Supreme Court of The Netherlands case, The Netherlands v. Respondents & Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica.²⁸ As Kristen Boon summarized:

The central legal issue in the case was whether the Dutch state, via the acts of Dutchbat, was responsible in whole or in part for the deaths of the Bosnian victims. The plaintiffs were the Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica (Stichting Mothers) who represented the relatives of 6,000 victims. They initiated suit against the Netherlands and the United Nations in 2007. The plaintiffs argued that the defendants should be held responsible for the deaths because they did too little to protect the population of the [UN designated] safe area around Srebrenica and during the evacuation of the refugees, and cooperated in the separation of males from other refugees. The Dutch state argued that the deaths were caused by the acts of the vrs [Army of Republika Srpska].²⁹

The Court’s finding was a narrow one that focused on the “probabilities of survival of the victims,” rather than attributing responsibility.³⁰ Despite this failure to attribute wrongdoing, the case remains significant as an effort to seek damages for victims from national authorities for actions taken as part of a multinational international operation.

This creates a reliance on courts or some form of dispute resolution to determine the nature of the harm and to prescribe a reasonable remedy for that harm, including who will provide the resources if financial compensation is involved. In court systems like that of the United States, where judges are generalists, settling such questions increasingly requires some understanding of applicable international standards and obligations. However, in many countries, including the United States, international law is not a required subject in law school or on the bar examination to qualify for practice. Nevertheless, judges and advocates, as well as those involved in private sector mediation and arbitration, are increasingly called on to deal with disputes requiring knowledge of relevant international law that they do not have. To remedy this, the international law academy in a globalized world must teach broadly and concertedly, including in settings outside of the academy.

Who Is the Audience for International Law Teaching?

Students

Although a case can be made for teaching international law at the secondary level, this chapter will focus on students in postsecondary education,³¹ with a further distinction between undergraduate students studying law and professional students studying law. Both groups are law students, but their curricula are different. The goal of an undergraduate majoring in law – generally the situation outside the United States – may not be the practice of law as a lawyer or public official. The major can lead to graduate work in another discipline or to professional training at a law school. In the U.S., the professional training is usually a three-year course leading to the Juris Doctor (jd) – a professional doctorate. In many countries outside the U.S., after university study, students are tracked to become judges, prosecutors, or notaries based, on qualifying examinations followed by additional specialized training for those positions.

The majority of U.S. students who graduate from law school have, historically, done so with the goal of private law practice. However, this is changing, and the U.S. academy encourages students to think more broadly about how to use a legal education outside the traditional practice of law in such areas as management or entrepreneurship.³² This has led to the development of new courses such as accounting for lawyers or business for lawyers, but so far, less often to courses in international law, despite its relevance to the private sector. On why law students should study international law, John Sexton, the pioneering dean of a global law school at New York University, wrote twenty years ago:

There are many levels at which globalization and legal education intersect. Since our graduates will practice in a globalized world, they will have to know how the reality of globalization affects the way legal rules operate, and they must develop a set of techniques for mediating within a much more sovereign system.³³

Continuing Legal Education for Licensed Practitioners

Due to the growth of domestic subjects that now involve international legal standards or obligations, individuals whose practice started out being completely domestic are likely to find that their subject area of expertise has become an international one. A survey of law practitioners in the Philadelphia area noted that 67.5% of those asked reported they had worked on a legal matter that required them to have some knowledge of international law.³⁴ For example, in family law, child support payment requirements in the U.S. must be in full compliance with the Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance – an international treaty which the U.S. signed in 2007 that entered into force for the U.S. in 2017.³⁵ In the UK, Rosalyn Higgins reported in 2010 that 45% of cases on appeal to the House of Lords involved some aspect of international law.³⁶

In the United States, lawyers must be admitted to the bar of a specific state in order to practice there, and most states require continuing legal education (cle) for practitioners to maintain their license. As a result, bar associations and universities offer cle coursework that allows lawyers to build on their basic legal training throughout their career. Continuing legal education generally focuses on the applied and is less theory-based, but certificate and degree programs are also available. Many of these courses are now offered in intensive, condensed or online forms and are taught by leading practitioners rather than by academics. For a representative sample of international law related cle programs, see the Events and cle page of the American Bar Association’s Section of International Law.³⁷

Public Officials

Given the depth and breadth of international intercourse today, increasing numbers of officials at all levels of government find themselves implementing international law and having to explain its requirements to their constituents, colleagues, and political leaders. For example, the International Organization for Migration provides international law training around the world to border guards, investigators, prosecutors, working-level police and immigration officials, judges, public and government officials in order to combat human trafficking.³⁸ But few people not engaged professionally with migration issues have heard of the iom and may wonder why their governments spend money to support it.

The Under2Coalition is an alliance of over 200 subnational jurisdictions from 43 countries committed to fighting climate change by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050.³⁹ For these officials, understanding and explaining to their constituents both the form and content of relevant international agreements is necessary to facilitate cooperation, networking, and the advancement of their policy agendas. In May 2021 in response to the lower vaccination rates in Mexico, members of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors worked with the Mexican Consulate to provide for a mobile clinic in Baja California to inoculate 10,000 Mexican workers on the Mexican side of the border to keep open the supply chains from the region to the U.S.⁴⁰

General Public

The results of the 2016 Presidential election in the United States, like the simultaneous British departure from the European Union (Brexit), reflected the antipathy of voters in many democracies, not only the U.S. and UK, toward what they regard as the negative impact of decades of international cooperation, represented in their eyes by treaty obligations and membership in international organizations that they believe restrict national freedom of action. If who cost the U.S. taxpayer money, but could not prevent covid-19 from reaching the United States, then what good was it? There was little public outcry when President Donald Trump notified the United Nations Secretary-General on 6 July 2020 of the U.S. intention to withdraw from the organization.

Days following his inauguration as U.S. President, Joseph Biden reversed this decision on January 22, 2021, but public antipathy towards an international institution demonstrates the general lack of understanding of what international law and institutions are, how they work, and the range of options they can offer a country and its citizens. As someone once said to me about international law when I worked in the U.S. Senate, “I am not sure what international law is, but I am pretty sure that it is not good for me.” To be sure, international organizations can be “held hostage to international rivalries and bogged down in endless negotiation on minor details.”⁴¹ But such hostility toward international law and its mutual obligations can impede, as it did in 2020, a concerted response to a deadly global crisis whether covid-19 or climate change.

International law is not well developed in every aspect and is in need of change and improvement, but it is today as present in our civic and political lives as are the constitutions that govern our countries. This means that a basic understanding of what international law is and how it works needs to be a part of public education to enhance the level of international law literacy. That literacy undoubtedly varies from country to country, but there is little doubt that it is well below public familiarity with domestic institutions. Improving awareness and understanding of international law among the media and thought leaders in countries around the world would help increase public awareness of international law’s role in issues as they arise.

What Are the Goals and Objectives of Teaching International Law to These Groups?

In teaching undergraduates, faculty goals are to prepare students for more specialized training and to provide an advanced understanding of civic rights, responsibilities, and duties. The undergraduate course in international law can introduce the idea that multiple systems of law not only exist, but regularly interact with each other. Asking students to write and to think about international law in the context of politics and a domestic legal system can also demonstrate the general limits on all law to provide solutions to policy problems.

For the professional law student, knowledge of international law is an essential part of professional competence to ensure that practitioners are fully aware of the range of possible solutions and remedies available to their clients. Legal education today builds on a basic understanding that there is more than one approach to solving a client’s problem and requires students to seek solutions in multiple venues. Professional education should require students to question accepted domestic legal orthodoxy, and in doing so break ground to advance the development of law both international and domestic.⁴²

Providing international law training for practitioners as part of cle enables them to keep up with new developments in subjects and processes that may not even have existed when they were in law school. International regulatory issues concerning virtual currencies and the internet have only emerged in recent years but are now center stage. There have been major international law developments in private law governing family relations, property ownership, business transactions, and legal processes. The list of Conventions, Protocols, and Principles produced by the Hague Conference on International Law provides a representative sample of the subject matters with which legal practitioners now need to be familiar that did not exist sixty years ago.⁴³ These developments require updating and continuing education.

Public officials at many levels bear the primary responsibility for carrying out numerous international obligations to which their countries have agreed including affording consular protection to foreign nationals, serving legal documents from foreign courts, and enforcing child support arrangements. The training they need to carry out these responsibilities is no different from that required to ensure compliance with domestic law, and the legal academy and practitioners need to provide it. In today’s transnational legal environment, cross border actions are regulated by international law, domestic law, or, more likely, a combination of the two. Domestic public officials can provide a bridge to a feedback loop or (recursivity) so that those who set international norms and standards can see how these actually perform on the ground to achieve their purposes.⁴⁴ In its teaching and writing, the legal academy needs to capture the experiences of local officials in order to further develop international law.

The expansion of international law into new subject areas since World War ii has directly affected individuals around the world, but in ways that are not always well understood. International agreements affect jobs, supply chains, marriages, divorce, adoption and other areas of personal conduct, rights, and protection. On a daily basis, the delivery of millions of packages, the arrival and departure of passenger and cargo aircraft and vessels, and the transmission of money and data depend on “functional” treaties, arrangements, and institutions that are some of the oldest in the world. In more politically-charged issue areas such as humanitarian relief, a better-informed public would perhaps have more tolerance for the need to balance sovereignty and intervention.⁴⁵ And awareness of the special meaning of refugee status as provided by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees⁴⁶ might help the public and political leaders understand the often fraught judgment calls demanded of immigration and border officials. This knowledge might help assuage deep seated feelings of losing control or identity, and at the very least explain why countries chose to enter into such obligations.

It may, indeed, be impossible to sustain support for international obligations without knowledge of the historic reasons for their existence. The result of ignorance can be a visceral and emotionally charged rejection of these obligations by individuals susceptible to demagogic manipulation, rather than a willingness to support a more measured effort to revise and update them. In our teaching, the legal academy has its own responsibility to democratic institutions, requiring us to teach not only to law students and practitioners, but to contribute to a better informed general public. An online presence and a rejection of legal jargon in media and public discussions are necessary to success in this area.

What Should Be the Content of International Law Teaching?

Few undergraduate degree programs in the U.S. require international law, although there are notable exceptions. At the United States Military Academy at West Point, international law is part of a core class on law and has been part of cadet education for 200 years. Vattel’s Law of Nations was adopted as a textbook at the Academy in 1821.⁴⁷ Mainly, however, international law undergraduate courses are electives. When I have taught them, the format is usually a large lecture class, and the approach a modified case method with hypothetical exercises. I adopted this approach because many taking an undergraduate class are considering attending law school. The hypothetical case exercises give them a taste of that experience and keeps them actively engaged even in a class of more than 100 students. There is typically a mid-term and a final examination including both short answer and essay questions.

Colleagues teaching undergraduates in the U.S. seem generally to have a mix of these elements in their courses to achieve two principal objectives. The first is to consider the relevance of international law to daily life and to examine how political, social, economic, and historic forces shape international law and how international law in turn shapes and directs those forces. The second objective is to demonstrate how international law enables states, private sector entities, and sub-state actors to deal with issues that transcend functional and physical boundaries. Interactive exercises like simulations and mock trials including use of the problems produced for the Phillip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition, help students engage with these issues. In 2021, the Jessup problem dealt with a pandemic.⁴⁸ In countries where the curricular content is more standardized than in the U.S., there may be less scope for innovation beyond the doctrinal presentation of the material to prepare students for required exams.

In teaching international law to professional law students, many different formats and settings reflect the time available in the curriculum to teach international law as well as a variety of views on how best to engage student interest. One approach is to make international law a required short course. One example of this is Georgetown University Law Center’s one credit, one-week course required of all students between the first and second semester of the first year. Entitled Week One: Law in a Global Context, the course is designed to introduce “students to a complex problem that involves not only U.S. law, but also international and/or foreign law in a transnational setting so they can begin to understand how legal problems” increasingly transcend national boundaries and involve more than one legal system.⁴⁹

Another approach is to require a full semester course running 12–14 weeks, but a survey reveals that only 19% of U.S. law schools require a course in international law. More U.S. law schools offer international law as one of a small number of electives available during the otherwise set curriculum of the typical first year.⁵⁰ One of them is Harvard Law School, which has made a diverse education with exposure to international legal studies a major priority in the first-year curriculum. In 2008, Harvard Law School offered five three-hour foundational courses from which students were required to select one. The courses were: Public International Law; Law and the International Economy; The Constitution and the International Order; China; and private law systems around the world. In 2021, Harvard Law School has a Spring 1L requirement of a first-year course in international or comparative law. This upper-level requirement provides for the completion of one international and comparative law course with a minimum of 3 classroom credits. In the 2021–22 academic year, there are 16 full term international and comparative courses offered in the course catalog. More specifically, there are now 10 courses offered in Spring 2021 that satisfy the international or comparative law upper-level requirement for first year students. These are Antitrust Law & Economics – Global, Comparative Law: Why Law? Lessons from China, International Human Rights, International Trade Law, Introduction to Islamic Law, Legal Architecture of Globalization: Money, Debt, and Development, Legal History: Continental Legal History, Pathways and Pitfalls: Role of International Human Rights and Constitutional Law in Achieving lgbt Equality, Public International Law, and The International Law of the Sea.⁵¹

Using international law problems in courses on legal writing or research is an approach that reaches large numbers of students, since writing and research are required of all students in U.S. law schools.⁵² Embedding or integrating relevant international law into subject specific topics, so that international law elements are included in the teaching of contracts or criminal law, etc., is yet another approach.⁵³ In this way, students can see how international law works in contracts or in criminal law in the context of a particular domestic jurisdiction.⁵⁴ Some schools offer experiential learning in an applied setting like a clinic or field study to a law firm, business, non-governmental organization or international organization outside of a student’s home country to gain exposure to international law.⁵⁵ Students can also broaden their understanding of current international law topics and scholarship by serving as student editors of the nearly 100 international law journals now regularly published in the U.S. The oldest such journal is the Harvard International Law Journal, first published in 1959. These journals provide students with an intense hands-on experience with scholarly analysis, reference checking, and validation of claims and conclusions.

Moot courts are also a popular way to learn about international law and to interact with international counterparts. Such programs include the Jessup, Vis, and Cassin competitions.⁵⁶ Each of these competitions is structured around an international institution or process. The Philip C. Jessup moots a contentious case before the International Court of Justice. The Willem C. Vis moots international commercial arbitration and focuses on the application of the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and other international commercial law. The Jessup and Vis competitions are conducted in English. The René Cassin competition is conducted in French and moots a case before the European Court of Human Rights that also conducts a separate competition for English-speaking students.

Marking its 60th anniversary in the 2018–2019 competition year, The Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition is the oldest of the student international law competitions, with 680 schools from 100 countries participating annually. Depending on the size of the country, the Jessup can involve students competing initially in a domestic competition to produce a national team that then competes in the international rounds. These take place in Washington, DC during the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law. In 2021, the Global Rounds took place virtually on a custom built competition platform.⁵⁷ 550 teams participated from more than 90 countries with 1100 volunteer judges contributing.⁵⁸ These volunteer judges come from law faculty, practitioners, national and international judiciaries and coaches, are part of an enduring and wide-ranging network that provides opportunity for outreach in international law.

Held annually since 1994 in Vienna, the Vis Moot attracts more than 300 law schools from around the world. Since 2003, the Willem C. Vis (East) Moot has been held in Hong Kong just before the competition in Vienna to allow students in Asia an opportunity to compete in an international competition without traveling too far from the region.⁵⁹ This is a separate competition and Vis (East) competitors do not compete in the Vis rounds in Vienna. The Vis draws approximately 150 teams every year. The René Cassin is the oldest moot in French celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2015. This competition draws thirty teams from Europe and Canada. The competition is held in Strasbourg with judges from the European Court of Human Rights participating. Held also at the European Court of Human Rights, English-speaking students compete in the elsa Moot Court.⁶⁰

One of the most ambitious efforts to integrate international and comparative law teaching into a law school’s curriculum is what McGill University in Montreal, Canada calls “transsytemia.” Although a completely separate body of law, comparative law is sometimes combined with international law as part of introducing students to foreign legal traditions and perspectives. As McGill describes the transsytemic approach initiated in 1999, it:

[E]nables students, who graduate with both civil law and common law degrees, to study the world’s great legal traditions in an integrated fashion. McGill’s transsystemic approach is bilingual [English and French] and dialogic. It recognizes legal pluralism as a pervasive phenomenon in the modern world.⁶¹

This approach was adopted so that students at McGill would acquire knowledge about different legal systems in an integrated rather than sequential manner. Previously, McGill law students studied Common Law Property, Contracts, and Torts and then Civil Law Property and Obligation. The transsystemic approach integrated these classes, not by simply switching back and forth between the common law and the civil law, but working with both systems to explore concepts, practice, and outcomes. It is intellectually demanding for both faculty and students, but over the decades has produced lawyers able to work across multiple legal systems.⁶²

For professional law schools in the U.S., the biggest challenge is to find a place to include international law in a curriculum driven by a student’s need to secure employment and to pass the bar examination. Job placement objectives discourage students from taking a full course in international law since they often perceive limited employment opportunities in the field. As a program director in charge of international programs first at the University of Illinois and now at Texas A&M University School of Law, I have therefore found it more effective to use shorter applied and problem-focused courses through field study or other forms of international placement to introduce students to the daily applicability of international law. Such courses offer U.S. law students personal encounters with students and practitioners from outside the U.S. who may be better versed in international law and able to share insights through personal experience into the relevance of international law.

Since 2014, Texas A&M University School of Law offers field study courses to the Cayman Islands, Cambodia, Ghana, Israel, Jersey, Scotland, and Iceland. As part of a semester-long Global Lawyering course treating the basics of international and comparative law, students select a theme for their written projects and travel in small groups with one or two faculty members, to the country/region partnering with the law school in that thematic area. Students have the opportunity to spend time, usually about two weeks, with academics, practitioners, and fellow law students working in their areas of interest. Themes for the field courses are:

Cayman Islands:Financial Regulation
Cambodia:Collaborative Management and Land Use, Human Rights
Ghana:Land Use and Access to Legal Services
Israel:Water Management and Dispute Resolution
Jersey:Financial Regulation
Scotland:Natural Resource Management and Dispute Resolution
Iceland:Comparative Criminal Law Practices.

Field study locations are selected based on a number of criteria: location including the ability to get around a country to experience relevant sites; adequate faculty or other contacts and resources to develop a good program; availability of a good partner to help with local arrangements; and likely internship opportunities for students either immediately following the field study or soon thereafter. Participation in these field course has generated greater interest in both international and comparative law among Texas A&M University School of Law students.⁶³

cle courses in international law for practitioners are generally intensive because of time constraints and cover a specific topic in a single day workshop. Such courses are designed to fulfill mandatory training required either by licensing authorities or by an institutional employer. Typically, bar associations and other legal organizations like the American Society of International Law (asil) offer cle training. Members also receive high quality and up to date information on specific international law topics at asil and other associations’ annual meetings and ongoing topical programs, both in person and, increasingly, online. Continuing international law education available through professional associations to judges, law enforcement officers, food and drug safety inspectors, customs and agriculture workers, and other public officials offers them information relevant to their daily work.

The legal academy can best engage the general public by participating in open media events in a non-partisan setting. Opening some international law programs offered at professional association meetings to public attendance is another promising idea and in use by organizations like the American Foreign Service Association.⁶⁴ General public interest in and concern with specific events, including covid-19, provide opportunities to explain the give and take of international negotiation and the goals and objectives of international obligations to an audience focused, at least for a while, on how to do things better in the future. This was, indeed, the approach used by our international law predecessors during World War ii to engage U.S. support for the United Nations. The covid-19 lockdown pushed institutions like law schools – including the Texas A&M University School of Law – to provide more such programs using webinar formats, thereby expanding their geographic and demographic reach.⁶⁵

What to Teach?

From the standpoint of the international law academic, the broad category of international law encompasses a range of analytical approaches, including comparative law; transnational law; transsystemic law; and the classic international law of Westphalian state to state relations. Each of us generally teaches from our own orientations and academic and professional backgrounds. Does it matter that we take different approaches? I do not believe so, as long as the basic core concepts of international law are covered. We need to be clear in our own minds about what we are doing and why and allow students to see that there are a variety of approaches that are equally valid.

The fundamental challenge in any teaching is to balance breadth and depth. International law is no different, but there are basic concepts that every law student should understand. These are the areas that make international law a distinctive legal system. They will also be the areas that give rise to issues as international legal obligations become part of a country’s domestic law. The foundational elements are the sources of international law, its jurisdiction, and dispute resolution as the structural basis, with specific topics included as time permits. Such other topics might include the use of force, human rights, trade, the law of the sea, and the environment. The focus of any foundational teaching will be seeing that students understand how international law shapes international relations and how international and domestic legal systems intersect.

In the case of treaties and custom as sources of international law, the legal effects in a domestic system like that of the U.S. differ. The U.S. Constitution contains specific requirements for the adoption of treaties and their place in the U.S. legal system. With regard to custom, the relevant questions are how widespread a practice is and how much evidence exists that states regard themselves as legally bound by that practice. Students must also understand the core concept of jurisdiction. Domestic authorities may only assert jurisdiction if an act occurs within the territory of the state or through some other link, such as the perpetrator’s or victim’s nationality.

In the case of universal jurisdiction, a state may prosecute such crimes as genocide should the perpetrator be found in its territory even if there is no other territorial or nationality connection. Understanding the issues of jurisdiction will also flesh out the limits to sovereign immunity, which generally does not apply to commercial activity, even if conducted by the state. International disputes can be resolved in domestic judicial and arbitration bodies, international law now has a set of dispute resolution mechanisms and institutions of its own. These include international and regional courts, arbitral bodies like the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, and private dispute resolution services offered by Chambers of Commerce around the world.⁶⁶

For the professional law student, application of this foundational content will serve to hone the skills of an effective practitioner in both domestic and international arenas. These include:

–Recognizing that different solutions to a problem might be possible;
–Understanding the limits of the law to solve policy problems;
–Identifying multiple ways to regulate behavior that may not always be through legislated or enacted law;
–Understanding the range of analytical approaches and interpretive strategies available for problem-solving or advocacy through exposure to different legal systems.

By introducing the basic concepts of international law and showing how they interact with concepts of the domestic legal system of the country in which the class is being taught, the classic semester or term-long overview of international law makes international law relevant to the student who will most likely work within his or her domestic legal system. The pitfall of this approach, however, is that it may convey a level of certainty and a tendency to generalize about how international law works, rather than a realization that certain interactions are relevant only to a particular jurisdiction or constitutional framework. Faculty using this approach must therefore find ways to help their students understand the broad range of possibilities available to international law as it interacts with the laws and systems of nearly 200 countries around the world.

The transnational approach to teaching, in contrast, focuses on the interactions that take place among legal systems, rather than focusing only one the domestic with international law.⁶⁷ This blend of international and comparative law concepts and methods features particular international and foreign law interactions with domestic law, and focuses on those interactions rather than on the system of international law. It has the virtue of showing how international law works in practice, rather than studying it in the abstract. The approach is also inclusive in terms of recognizing all legal activity, regardless of the source or level, and it educates students to think of law as a continuum, with multiple legal systems working concurrently to offer answers to particular legal questions or problems. Teaching from a transnational perspective allows students to examine a range of topic areas, both public and private, and to focus on the interaction of legal systems, rather than pigeonhole a subject as a matter of public or private law. Professor Mathias Reimann, who pioneered this approach at the University of Michigan, described its advantages:

The most obvious one is that you are graduating a student body every member of which has at least a minimal knowledge of law beyond American borders. To be sure, that knowledge is often minimal indeed. Still, at least every graduate knows what a treaty is, can read the recent crop of Supreme Court cases dealing with international issues and understand them, has a sense of what the wto does, and realizes that the UN General Assembly cannot legislate. While that is not much, it is a lot more than what the majority of graduates knew before. ⁶⁸

The advantage to students of short course, experiential, and moot exercises, is that they are motivated to learn the specific law applicable to the course focus or problem, i.e. international human rights law, environmental law, or commercial law. The weakness is that if this is their only exposure to international law, students may not understand the broader legal and political framework within which international law operates. As international law teachers, we need to ensure that our students are exposed to the broad outlines of international law, even if briefly, so that they understand the wider context in which it works. Any time that can be dedicated to introducing the core concepts and operating principles of international law would be beneficial.

The practicing lawyer should have acquired in law school an adequate general understanding of international law to be able to deal with specific subject matters. But in the U.S., historically, this has certainly not been the case for most law school graduates. Judges, senior officials, and senior practitioners often do not understand the role of international law because the foundation was not laid during their formal education. Part of our goal with today’s law students is to give them at least a basic knowledge of international law so that this will not be true in the future.

Of the non-specialist and non-lawyer, former International Court of Justice President Rosalyn Higgins said:

We could regard it as a civic duty that persons everywhere understand that the relations of their country with others, with the United Nations and with other organizations, are governed by a law other than their own national law. To avoid nationalism of the worst sort and ignorant parochialism, it is necessary that the ordinary citizen understand that there is a well-ordered structure for international relations – a structure and a system that all states accept.⁶⁹

Only with this foundational knowledge, Higgins believes, will individual citizens be able to exercise the rights and other entitlements now provided them by international law obligations accepted by their own governments.⁷⁰ The desire to instill this level of civic literacy in the United States more than a century ago prompted senior U.S. officials like Secretary of State Elihu Root to found the American Society of International Law in 1906. In the first pages of the first issue of the American Journal of International Law, Root wrote:

The increase of popular control over national conduct, which marks the political development of our time, makes it constantly more important that the great body of the people in each country should have a just conception of their rights and duties.⁷¹

Root believed it essential “to increase the general public knowledge of international rights and duties and to promote a popular habit of reading and thinking about international affairs.”⁷² He understood this to be an ongoing task needed to temper public sentiments that otherwise fail to take into consideration the views of another side.

Root specifically referenced the hostility generated by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 that settled a number of outstanding border issues between the United States and Canada. (Root was born near that border, in upstate New York, in 1845). That hostility lingered into the early twentieth century when Root wrote the ajil article. His plea was that “in every country the people whom negotiators represent and to whom arbitrators must return, shall be able to consider the controversy and judge the action of their representatives in this instructed and reasonable way.”⁷³ Though more than a century has gone by since Root wrote these words and two world wars seemed to educate the American public about international rights and responsibilities, apparently little has changed in the “uncompromising and belligerent attitude” that he saw as obstructing peaceful international relations.⁷⁴ Reaching the general public to foster understanding of the give and take of international politics and the role international law plays in facilitating these relations therefore remains an urgent and important aspect of teaching international law.

Who Teaches International Law?

Interest in the question of who teaches international law is growing as the international law academy reflects on who wields influence in its study and practice. It is important to understand what first impression students (and general audiences) receive from their encounters with the subject. Two generations of U.S. students (including my own) had the good fortune to study with international law scholars who had fled Europe to escape Nazi Germany. Refugee status, genocide, and the peaceful settlement of disputes were not abstract issues, but matters of life and death for them and their families.⁷⁵ Embryonic international institutions, like the early European Communities and the United Nations, might be imperfect, but they were regarded as worth the effort to avoid another conflict at the scale of World War ii.

Since international law has universal applicability, those teaching and studying international law may assume that international law transcends national and other perspectives like economic circumstances, historic experiences, and values. In fact, we see the limits of international law’s universality if we consider the backgrounds and experiences of those in the international law academy. Ryan Scoville and Milan Markovic examined the backgrounds of faculty teaching international law at U.S. law schools. What they discovered was that only 66% of those studied had one of the following attributes of international experience:⁷⁶

–at least one year of university study abroad
–practicing law at a foreign office of a law firm
–working for an international organization or ngo outside the U.S.
–serving in a foreign government
–working at a foreign law school.

What these findings revealed is that the strongest resumé for aspiring American law academics includes graduation from a top law school, experience at a major law firm, and a judicial clerkship. This career path leaves little room for meaningful professional experience overseas.⁷⁷

To the extent that U.S. law faculty have overseas experience, it was usually acquired by studying or teaching abroad. Nearly 40% had taught at a foreign university; 35% had an undergraduate or graduate degree from a foreign university. Most with these backgrounds were originally from outside the U.S. Employment outside of academia was far less common. This background encourages an approach to international law that is more theoretical and doctrinal than practical. When faculty have had practical international law experience in the U.S., it tends to be in the Department of State’s Office of the Legal Adviser. For a student interested in career opportunities outside of academia, job prospects in international law appear limited. Moreover, if the State Department seems to be the only potential employer, students with reservations about U.S. foreign policy may shy away from it.⁷⁸

To the extent that U.S. law professors did have experiences outside the U.S., they were geographically limited. 32% had studied or worked in western Europe, Australia, New Zealand or Canada. Only 19% had experiences exclusively outside those countries, with even fewer who had spent time in both western European and non-western countries. Of countries outside western Europe, the most commonly known were China, Israel, Japan, Russia, and South Africa.⁷⁹ Most of Africa, much of Asia, and all of Latin America are virtually unrepresented.

The limits of U.S. experience are not unique. Anthea Roberts’s study identifies the narrowness of international engagement among international law academics in several other countries. In Australia and the UK, it is common for academics teaching international law to hold a foreign law degree from the U.S. or UK, but study abroad is less common among academics in Russia and France. Even when there is international experience, looking at the outflow and inflow of students shows that a small number of countries dominate. China and Australia send students abroad, while the U.S. and the UK have historically been the principal recipients of these students. Perceptions of how welcome (and how safe) international students are in the U.S. and the UK and the latter’s exit from the European Union may change these flows, redirecting students to Australia and other parts of western Europe, but future, and particularly post-pandemic patterns remain unclear, particularly in the wake of covid-19.⁸⁰

Without a broader geographic and linguistic exposure, law professors will teach international law from the perspective with which they are most familiar, and that is their domestic legal systems. This may not be overly detrimental for students who principally will be applying international law in particular countries, but others will suffer from faculty who can provide little comparative insight into how another legal system applies the same international law. Students are also not exposed to the views of large parts of the world, with the views of Asia, Africa, and Latin America typically underrepresented.⁸¹ U.S. law schools are attempting to bring broader perspectives into the classroom. Strategies include:

–adding foreign professors and visiting academics to the teaching staff
–including international students in the student body
–developing a multi-subject global curriculum for international law
–incorporating materials from less represented areas: Africa, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia.

Providing the perspectives in the curriculum is useful, but requires student advising and guidance to help students take advantage of the opportunity.

Wrapping Up

In a 1977 article titled “The Invisible College of International Lawyers,” Oscar Schachter advanced the proposition that the community of international lawyers could play an important role in serving as “la conscience juridique” of international law. He saw this role fulfilled through scholarly discourse and through the authoritative work judges do when they decide a case. Schachter was not naïve about how states might use international law to advance their interests. Nevertheless, he felt that there were principles and possibly legal values that bound the community of international lawyers together in a way that could advance the development and observance of international law.⁸²

What Schachter underestimated was the effect of specialization within international law itself, leading to communities of specialists in human rights, trade law, the environment, and other subfields who do not see themselves as working at the same enterprise. As the International Law Commission (ilc) concluded in 2006,

such specialized law-making and institution-building tends to take place with relative ignorance of legislative and institutional activities in the adjoining fields and of the general principles and practices of international law. The result is conflicts between rules or rule-systems, deviating institutional practices and, possibly, the loss of overall perspective on the law.⁸³

Even as international law facilitated the development of these new bodies of law, their proponents failed to recognize and to promote the structure and principles that support the overall international legal system.⁸⁴ These basic principles provide the basic operating framework of the international legal system and remain constant while the normative content may change as issues and interests shift.⁸⁵

International law in this sense is like a computer’s operating system that provides the platform on which specific applications are placed. Without an operating system, the applications will not run. If the operating system is not powerful enough, applications will not run at full capacity. The same is true for international law. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Prohibition of the Crime of Genocide could only advance as far as the international system provided it with the means to execute its provisions, including, for example, UN peacekeeping operations; establishment of the International Criminal Court and the specialized courts for the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia; and especially incorporation of its principles into domestic law.⁸⁶ State consent to expand the operating international legal system is necessary to develop the content of a norm and assess its effects, and to empower institutions and individuals in the use of the new norm, creating the capacity to implement it.

Teaching international law as a system and process rather than as a set of rules pushes students to see international law, like all law, as including tasks like coordination, facilitation, and standard-setting, rather than judging it by its lack of compliance enforcement mechanisms. Working through the general operating international law structure provides students the ability to determine and to assess the long-term system-wide effects of individual decisions. Four decades after Schachter wrote of the “invisible college,” Santiago Villalpando wrote:

The core intellectual challenges raised by Schachter have also persisted in today’s community, including the eternal quest for objectivity and the problem of how to assess the influence of our own value systems and meta-juridical preferences, let alone our national positions, in resolving concrete legal problems. ⁸⁷

This remains true for the content of our teaching as well.

Although Rosalyn Higgins described international law as “humdrum stuff,”⁸⁸ this humdrum stuff has provided a structure for orderly international relations for centuries. It is perhaps this humdrum character of international law that makes teaching a challenge, because when things are working (as with the operating system of a computer), the user will not notice it. However, if the system fails to perform, then the user not only notices, but also wants an immediate correction or remedy. The latter can be difficult since international law is generally slow to change, given the level of consensus required among myriad international actors at multiple levels of authority to effect any change. Students who understand this as they move into their professional lives will hopefully be more resourceful and less frustrated global practitioners.

For more than a year, as I write, the world has grappled, incoherently, with a global pandemic that remains a threat to human life, economic stability, and democracy itself. At a time when teaching and awareness of international law cannot be more important, the international legal community needs to grapple with its own fragmentation and incoherence. Both for effective teaching and for the ongoing development of international law, the academy should focus on international law’s core concepts to be sure that all law students and professionals are aware of the sources of international law and how these interact with domestic and regional legal systems. Students and practitioners further need to be aware of how international law affects individuals and how it engages with other law in areas of jurisdiction, responsibility, and dispute resolution. Specific issues requiring immediate decisions include a waiver to the intellectual property rights that protect the production of covid-19 vaccines, as well as climate change and human migration. Are we preparing our law students today, born in the last decade of the twentieth century to practice in the mid-twenty-first century? Or are we sending them into the global environment ill-equipped to handle the tasks at hand?

Although teaching international law will remain the province of the academy, with primary teaching in the United States done in graduate academic institutions, academics should not rebuff the opportunity to disseminate as widely as possible information about international law. Indeed, one of the most far-reaching projects undertaken by the American Society of International Law was its 100 Ways project, launched during my tenure as asil Executive Director to mark the Society’s 2006 centennial. It identified 100 ways in which international law affects everyone’s daily life. The original booklet and now web material has not only been updated and widely disseminated since 2006, but has been used to teach and to focus discussion of international law at all educational levels.⁸⁹ The asil Insights series was another effort to raise general awareness in the public about the relevance of international law to specific issues like the effort to ease intellectual property restrictions on manufacturing covid-19 vaccines.⁹⁰

Teachers of international law can neither afford to forget nor to ignore the responsibility to seize every opportunity to teach and to increase awareness about international law as a central factor not only in the lives of nation-states, but also now in the lives of their citizens. One of the findings of the Independent Panel in Pandemic Preparedness and Response was that the international health system needed to engage with “local communities as key actors in pandemic preparedness and response and as active promoters of pandemic literacy, through the ability of people to identify, understand, analyse, interpret, and communicate about pandemics.”⁹¹ This cannot happen effectively without some knowledge, awareness, and understanding of how we are physically bound together on the planet and the legal relationships we have created to manage both the opportunities and challenges of that reality. Not only has international law become a more complex system, it now involves more people in myriad settings who have never previously worked together. To paraphrase Elihu Root, the more aware we are of this complexity, the more effective we will be as practitioners and citizens. As experience with the covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated, safeguarding lives and livelihoods depends on that awareness.

n.b. As I write the last lines of this chapter, I received news of the passing on May 31, 2021 of James R. Crawford – one of international law’s most gifted teachers and jurists whose insightful writings and scores of students stand as a model of the scholar-practitioner dedicated to the sound practice and understanding of international law. With appreciation for his many years of friendship, I dedicate this chapter.

Professor of Law and Director, Global Programs, Texas A&M University School of Law.

Research assistance provided by Kristen Rowlett, Dee J. Kelly Law Library, Texas A&M University School of Law, Adria Stallcup and Sarah Wright, Texas A&M University School of Law is gratefully acknowledged.

The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, “covid-19: Make It the Last Pandemic” (The Independent Panel May 2021) 24 <https://theindependentpanel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/COVID-19-Make-it-the-Last-Pandemic_final.pdf> accessed June 7, 2021.

Ibid 8.

Ibid 6.

See for example, who guidance that accompanied its finding in January that Covid-19 was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern available at https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/covid-19-public-health-emergency-of-international-concern-(pheic)-global-research-and-innovation-forum and file:///C:/Users/cku/Downloads/global-research-and-innovation-forum-towards-a-research-roadmap%20(1).pdf.

The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, “How an Outbreak Became a Pandemic” (The Independent Panel May 2021) 41 <https://theindependentpanel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/How-an-outbreak-became-a-pandemic_final.pdf > accessed June 7, 2021.

Ibid 45.

Council of the EU, “EU Supports Start of who Process for Establishment of Pandemic Treaty: Council Decision” (European Council May 20, 2021) <https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021/05/20/eu-supports-start-of-who-process-for-establishment-of-pandemic-treaty-council-decision/#:~:text=The%20Council%20adopted%20today%20a,on%20the%20fight%20against%20pandemics.&text=The%20proposal%20for%20an%20international,Peace%20Forum%20in%20November%202020.> accessed June 7, 2021.

asil Insight, (The American Society of International Law 2021) <https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/25/issue/9> accessed 30 June 2021.

“Statement from Ambassador Katherine Tai on the Covid-19 Trips Waiver” (United States Trade Representative May 5, 2021) <https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2021/may/statement-ambassador-katherine-tai-covid-19-trips-waiver> accessed June 7, 2021.

The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (n 3) 41. See What is covax at <https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/covax-explained>.

“Biden announces US to donate 500M vaccine doses in show of American leadership” (abc News 10 June 2021) <https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-announces-us-donate-500m-vaccine-doses-show/story?id=78201236> accessed 30 June 2021.

“Emmanuel Macron calls on EU to match US’ covid vaccine donation” (Newsweek 10 June 2021) <https://www.newsweek.com/emmanuel-macron-calls-eu-match-us-covid-vaccine-donations-1599560> accessed 30 June 2021.

cdc, “cdc covid Data Tracker” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2021) <https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home> accessed 7 June 2021.

Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (n 3) Preface May 2021.

Ibid 10 See details from Independent Panel report:

–US$ 10 trillion of output is expected to be lost by the end of 2021, and US$ 22 trillion in the period 2020–2025 – the deepest shock to the global economy since the Second World War and the largest simultaneous contraction of national economies since the Great Depression of 1930–32;
–At its highest point in 2020, 90% of schoolchildren were unable to attend school;
–10 million more girls are at risk of early marriage because of the pandemic;
–gender-based violence support services have seen fivefold increases in demand;
–115–125 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty.

“International Health Regulations” (World Health Organization 2021) <https://www.who.int/health-topics/international-health-regulations#tab=tab_1> accessed 30 Jun3 2021.

Independent Panel (n 7) 52.

Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal, “The Governance Triangle,” in Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods (eds), The Politics of Global Regulation (Princeton University Press 2009) 88.

Lassa Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise (1sr edn Longmans, Green and Co.1905).

Lassa Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise (3rd edn Longmans, Green and Co. 1920).

Lassa Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise, Hersch Lauterpacht (ed), (7th edn, Longmans, Green and Co.1952).

Rosalyn Higgins and others, Oppenheim’s International Law, United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2017).

“By authority is meant expectations of appropriateness in regard to the phases of effective decision processes. These expectations specifically related to personnel appropriately endowed with such decision-making power; the objectives they should pursue; the physical, temporal and institutional features of the situations in which lawful decisions are made; the values which may be used to sustain decisions, and so forth.” Myres McDougal, Harold Lasswell, and Michael Reisman, “The World Constitutive Process of Authoritative Decision” (1967) 19 Journal of Legal Education 256.

Eyal Benvenisti, “The who – Destined to Fail? Political Cooperation and the Covid-19 Pandemic” (2020) 114 American Journal of International Law 588–97.

“Court Dismisses Remaining Lawsuit against Haiti cholera” (New York Times, August 24, 2017) <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/world/americas/haiti-cholera-lawsuit-united-nations.html> accessed 30 June 2021.

UN Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office and UN Haiti Cholera Response at <http://mptf.undp.org/factsheet/fund/CLH00> accessed 30 June 2021.

“The Netherlands v. Respondents & Stichting, Mothers of Srebrenica No. 17/04567” (Supreme court of The Netherlands July 17, 2019) <https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id¼ECLI:NL:HR:2019:1284> accessed 30 June 2021.

Kristen Boon, “Case Note in International Decisions” (2020) 114 American Journal of International Law 480.

Ibid 485.

For examples of materials developed for teaching at the secondary level, see “High School Curriculum” (The American Society of International Law 2021) https://www.asil.org/education/high-school-curriculum accessed 11 June 2021.

Richard Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (2nd edn Oxford University Press, 2017) Larry Cata Backer, “Toward General Principles of Academic Specialization by Means of Certificate or Concentration Programs: Creating a Certificate Program in International, Comparative and Foreign Law at Penn State” (2001) 20 Penn State International Law Review 83.

John E. Sexton, “Out of the Box: Thinking About the Training of Lawyers in the Next Millennium” (2001) 33 University of Toledo Law Review 191.

Susan L. DeJarnatt and Mark C. Rahdert, “Preparing for Globalized Law Practice: The Need to Include International and Comparative Law in the Legal Writing Curriculum” (2010) 17 Legal Writing: Journal of Legal Writing Institute 20.

“U.S. Ratification of Hague Child Support Convention” <https://www.acf.hhs.gov/css/policy-guidance/us-ratification-hague-child-support-convention> accessed 30 June 2021.

See Rosalyn Higgins, “Teaching and Practicing International Law in a Global Environment: Toward a Common Language of International Law” (2010) 104 American Society of International Law Proceedings 198.

American Bar Association, “Events” (American Bar Association 2021) <https://www.americanbar.org/groups/international_law/events_cle.html> accessed 11 June 2021.

International Organization for Migration, “Regional Law Enforcement Training” (International Organization for Migration June 15, 2016) <https://www.iom.int/news/regional-law-enforcement-training> accessed 11 June 2021.

The Climate Group, “Under 2 Coalition” (The Climate Group 2021) <http://under2mou.org/coalition/> accessed 11 June 2021.

“San Diego County, Mexican Consulate Partner on Cross-Border Vaccines” (San Diego Union Tribune May 25, 2021) https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/may/25/san-diego-county-mexican-consulate-partner-cross-b/ accessed 30 June 2021.

Independent Panel on Pandemic Responsiveness and Preparedness (n 7) 45.

Vasuki Nesiah, “A Flat Earth for Lawyers without Borders: Rethinking Current Approaches to the Globalization of Legal Education” (2013) 5 Drexel Law Review (2013) 371.

“Conventions, Protocols and Principles) (hcch 2021) https://www.hcch.net/en/instruments/conventions accessed 11 June 2021.

Terence Halliday and Gregory Shaffer, Transnational Legal Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

“Responsibility to Protect” (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001) <https://www.globalr2p.org/resources/the-responsibility-to-protect-report-of-the-international-commission-on-intervention-and-state-sovereignty-2001/> accessed 30 June 2021.

“1951 Refugee Convention” (UN High Commissioner for Refugees 2021) https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/1951-refugee-convention.html accessed 30 June 2021.

Robert J. Goldstein, “Over There: Teaching International and Comparative Law at West Point,” (2014) 20 ilsa Journal of International & Comparative Law 265.

“Aprepluya v. Ranovstayo” (Jessup International Law Moot Court 2021) with past problems and memorials available at <https://www.ilsa.org/publications/jessup-compendium> accessed 30 June 2021.

“Events” (Georgetown University 2021) https://guevents.georgetown.edu/event/week_one_law_in_a_global_context#.WuZ06KqotMs accessed 10 June 2021.

DeJarnatt and Rahdert (n 35) 10.

“j.d. Requirements Quick Reference Guide” (Harvard Law School 2021) <https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/registrar/registration-information/jdreferenceguide/> and “Course Catalog” (Harvard Law School 2021) <https://hls.harvard.edu/academics/curriculum/catalog/index.html?year=2021-2022&keywords=&faculty=&term=&subject=International%2C+Comparative+%26+Foreign+Law&otherFilter=International%2FComparative&xtype=Clinic&xtype=Reading+Group&xtype=Seminar&rows=50> accessed 22 June 2021.

DeJarnatt and Rahdert, (n 35) 15–8.

Franklin A. Gevurtz, Global Issues in Corporate Law (1st edn Thomson/West 2006), Marc I. Steinberg, Franklin Gevurtz, and Eric Chaffee, Global Issues in Securities Law (1st edn West Academic Publishing 2013), Maxeiner (n 51) 40–1.

John A. Barrett, Jr.,; “International Legal Education in the United States: Being Educated for Domestic Practice While Living in a Global Society” (1997) 12 American University Journal of International Law & Policy 997–9.

“Foreign Programs” (American Bar Association 2021) https://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_education/resources/foreign_study/foreign_programs/ accessed 30 June 2021.

The list, however, may not include short international experiences that are part of global law classes offered at schools like Texas A&M University School of Law. “Global Programs” (Texas A&M University School of Law 2021) <https://law.tamu.edu/prospective/academics/centers-clinics-programs/global-programs> accessed 10 June 2021, Andrew Mitchell and others, “Education in the Field: A Case Study of Experiential Learning in International Law” (2011) 21 Legal Education Review 69–95. For a list of representative clinical experiences, see James Cooper, “Punching Above Our Weight: International Legal Studies at California Western School of Law” (2014) 44 California Western International Law Journal 219–21.

Carrie Menkel-Meadow, “Why and How to Study Transnational Law” (2011) 1 University of California Irvine Law Review 120–8.

<https://www.ilsa.org/Jessup/Jessup2021/Documents/2021OfficialAnnouncement.pdf> accessed 22 June 2021.

<https://www.ilsa.org/Jessup/Jessup2021/Global%20Rounds/Jessup_2021_Commemorative_Program.pdf> accessed 22 June 2021.

<https://www.cisgmoot.org/en-US/content/15744> accessed 22 June 2021.

“René Cassin Moot Court Competition” (European Court of Human Rights 2021) <https://www.echr.coe.int/Pages/home.aspx?p=events/mootcourt&c=> accessed 30 June 2021.

Paul-André Crépeau Center for Private and Comparative Law, “Transsystemic Legal Education” (McGill University 2021) <https://www.mcgill.ca/centre-crepeau/projects/transsystemic>.

Rosalie Jukier, “Where Law and Pedagogy Meet in the Transsytemic Contracts Classroom,” (2005) 50 McGill Law Journal 790.

“Field Studies: Global Lawyering: Texas A&M School of Law” (Texas A&M University School of Law 2021) http://law.tamu.edu/prospective/academics/centers-clinics-programs/global-programs/2021-field-studies accessed 10 June 2021.

“Upcoming and Past Events” (American Foreign Service Association 2021) https://www.afsa.org/upcoming-and-past-events accessed 30 June 2021.

Texas A&M University System, “Texas A&M Law School to Host Webinar Series on Effects of Coronavirus Relief Package” (Texas A&M Today April 3, 2020) <https://today.tamu.edu/2020/04/03/texas-am-law-school-to-host-webinar-series-on-effects-of-coronavirus-relief-package/> accessed 11 June 2021.

“Arbitration Institute” (Stockholm Chamber of Commerce 2021) <https://sccinstitute.com/> accessed 30 June 2021, “Arbitration” (International Chamber of Commerce 2021) <https://iccwbo.org/dispute-resolution-services/arbitration/> accessed 30 June 2021, “New York International Arbitration Center” (2021) < https://nyiac.org/> accessed 30 June 2021.

Mathias Reimann, “From the Law of Nations to Transnational Law: Why We Need a New Basic Course for the International Curriculum” (2004) 22 Pennsylvania State International Law Review 397–415.

Mathias Reimann, “Making Transnational Law Mandatory: Requirements, Costs, Benefits” (2005) 23 Pennsylvania State International Law Review 789.

Rosalyn Higgins, “Teaching and Practicing International Law in a Global Environment: Toward a Common Language of International Law” (2010) 104 American Society of International Law Proceedings 196.

Ibid 197.

Elihu Root, “The Need of Popular Understanding of International Law” (1907) 1 American Journal of International Law 1.

Ibid 2.

Ibid.

Ibid 1.

Elihu Lauterpacht, The Life of Hersch Lauterpacht (Cambridge University Press 2012).

Anthea Roberts, Is International Law International? (Oxford University Press, 2017), Ryan Scoville and Milan Markovic, “How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professor,” (2016) 38 Michigan Journal of International Law 119.

Scoville and Markovic (n 73) 126–9, James R. Maxeiner, “Learning from Others: Sustaining the Internationalization and Globalization of U.S. Law School Curriculums” (2008) 32 Fordham International Law Journal 52.

Ibid.

Karin Mickelson and others The Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (Brill Academic Publishers 2004).

Oscar Schachter, “The Invisible College of International Lawyers” (1977) 72 Northwestern University Law Review 217.

International Law Commission, Fragmentation of International Law: Difficulties Arising from the Diversification and Expansion of International Law, (UN Doc. a/cn.4/l/682 of 13 April 2006) para. 8.

Philip Alston, “The Myopia of the Handmaidens: International Lawyers and Globalization” (1977) 3 European Journal of International Law 435.

Paul F. Diehl and Charlotte Ku, The Dynamics of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010).

Ibid.

Santiago Villalpando, “The ‘Invisible College of International Law Forty Years Later” (2013) European Society of International Law 2013 Research Forum: International Law as a profession Conference Paper Conference Paper 6.

Rosalyn Higgins, The Politics and Process of International Law (Clarendon Press 1995) 1.

“International Law: 100 Ways it Shapes Our Lives” (American Society of International Law 2021) <https://www.asil.org/education/100Ways> accessed 11 June 2021.

“asil Insights” (American Society of International Law 2021) < https://www.asil.org/insights> accessed 30 June 2021.

Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response (n 3) 59.

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Teaching International Law

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004678880

Publisher:: Brill | Nijhoff

Print Publication Date:: 13 Dec 2023

Subjects
- Education
  - Adult Education
- International Law
  - International Law: General Interest
  - Comparative Law

Front Matter

Part I Introduction

Part II The “Global” Perspective

Part III National and Regional Perspectives, New Methodological Approaches

Part IV Teaching Different Sub-disciplines of International Law

Part V Tools, Instruments, Resources

Part VI Scholarship on Teaching of International Law

Part VII Final Remarks

Back Matter

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Chapter 2 U.S. Approaches to Teaching International Law in a Global Environment

Abstract

International Law in a Globalized Environment1

Teaching international law

What Will the Post-covid-19 World Be Like?

Who Is the Audience for International Law Teaching?

Students

Continuing Legal Education for Licensed Practitioners

Public Officials

General Public

What Are the Goals and Objectives of Teaching International Law to These Groups?

What Should Be the Content of International Law Teaching?

What to Teach?

Who Teaches International Law?

Wrapping Up

Bibliography

Share link with colleague or librarian

Teaching International Law

Table of Contents

References

Metrics

Metrics

International Law in a Globalized Environment¹