The Sovereignty of Personal Jurisdiction

draft available upon request

2025

Abstract: We are in a heyday of personal jurisdiction cases at the Supreme Court, yet the Court has not managed to resolve a fundamental question: Do constitutional limits on state courts’ exercise of personal jurisdiction stem from states’ status as co-equal sovereigns, from individuals’ right to liberty, or from both?...
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Modeling Immunity in International and Domestic Courts

Colum. J. Transnat'l Bull.

2025
SSRN

Abstract: Into what can sometimes appear a chasm of impunity, Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji has published a timely new book and call to action, End of Immunity: Holding World Leaders Accountable for Aggression, Genocide, War Crimes, and Crimes Against Humanity. With it, the former International Criminal Court President defends a provocative...
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U.S. Sanctions Extraterritoriality

drafting in progress

2025

Abstract: Scholars have long disputed the legality under international law of U.S. sanctions programs that apply to entirely foreign transactions in order to shape conduct abroad. Relatively little attention has been paid in the scholarly conversation, however, to “currency-based” or “correspondent banking” theories where the U.S. government asserts jurisdiction over...
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Hobbes and the Liberal Tradition in International Law

39 Temp. Int'l & Compar. L.J. (forthcoming)

2025

Abstract: A particular iteration of liberal theory is commonplace in international law and related discussions. As Vasuki Nesiah recounts in a forthcoming chapter in the Oxford Handbook on Women and International Law, this iteration is a theory of individualized, disembodied political subjects who experience ever-improving conditions alongside the development of...
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Procedural Sovereign Distinction

57 Vand. J. Transnat'l L. 469

2024
SSRN

Abstract: U.S. law differentiates between two categories of foreign defendants—sovereign and private. On one level, whether a foreign entity is sovereign determines whether they are presumptively entitled to immunity in domestic courts, and this is justified by the nature of sovereignty as articulated in U.S. and international law. However, different...
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Russia Continues Pressing Sovereignty Claims in the Yukos Award Saga

Transnational Litigation Blog

January 25, 2024
link

Abstract: Yukos Oil Company (“Yukos”) shareholders’ attempts to enforce their $50 billion arbitral award against the Russian Federation are moving forward in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. On November 17, 2023, Judge Beryl Howell denied Russia’s motion to dismiss the case for lack of subject matter...
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Missouri’s COVID Suit Against China Revived

Transnational Litigation Blog

January 17, 2024
link

Abstract: The Eighth Circuit has breathed life back into Missouri’s attempts to hold the People’s Republic of China (PRC) responsible in U.S. court for the COVID-19 pandemic. Missouri filed this claim in April 2020 and, as Chimène Keitner outlined at the time, the case is rife with Foreign Sovereign Immunities...
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Culpability in Atrocity and the Role of Complicit Observer

37 Temp. Int'l & Compar. L.J. 11

2023
SSRN

Abstract: Randle DeFalco’s recent book, Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Law, argues that atrocity crimes are commonly associated with an aesthetic of horrific spectacle, the “‘criminal’ nature” of which is “intuitively recognizable.” Taking DeFalco’s book as a useful and provocative starting point, this essay proposes a further...
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Impossible Commands: Hobbes and Spinoza on Law, Rights, and Resistance

draft available upon request

2023

Abstract: What should we make of would-be laws or sovereign commands that require an individual to violate their essential human nature? The answers that Hobbes and Spinoza offer to this question shed light both on individuals’ obligations and orientation to the civil state, and on the relationship between these two...
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North Sea Continental Shelf Cases

The Global Encyclopedia of Territorial Rights

2022
SSRN

Abstract: This encyclopedia entry describes and analyzes the North Sea Continental Shelf Cases, a 1969 judgment of the International Court of Justice regarding the international law principles applicable to delimitation of the North Sea continental shelf between three adjacent States. The Court held coastal States have an inherent right to...
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Citizens in Chains: Hobbes, State Violence, and the Right of Resistance

draft available upon request

2021

Abstract: The phenomenon of states committing violence against their own citizens, the most dramatic expression of which is genocide, challenges us to consider what obedience citizens owe the sovereign, if any, under such circumstances. What becomes of the sovereign’s commands? What becomes of law?
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Pompeo’s Personal Stake in the International Criminal Court’s Afghan Investigation (with Randle DeFalco)

Just Security

June 3, 2020
link

Abstract: It is no secret that the Trump administration, in general, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, specifically, are hostile toward the International Criminal Court (ICC), particularly as it relates to the ICC’s investigation into potential U.S. abuses in Afghanistan since 2003. The Obama administration also resisted the Court’s veering...
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Historic Condemnation of the Destruction of Cultural Heritage at the International Criminal Court: The Case of Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi

ABA Art & Cultural Heritage Law Newsletter

2017
pdf

Abstract: “Justice did not tremble,” reported French newspaper Le Monde on September 29, 2016, describing the conclusion of this historic case at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Prosecutor v. Al Mahdi was replete with “firsts” for the Court: first prosecution for destruction of cultural heritage; first prosecution of an Islamic...
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Will Russia Pay the Yukos Settlement?

Institute of Modern Russia

March 26, 2015
link

Abstract: In July 2014, the Hague issued a ruling that the Russian government had wrongly seized the Yukos oil company from its shareholders and was required to pay restitution in the amount of $50 billion. The following February, Russia appealed the court decision. This article reviews the case, Russia’s arguments,...
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