This chapter describes territorial conflicts among lords, parishes, cities and towns, and how they contributed to emerging notions of the territoriality of states. It surveys debates regarding both the expansion to new territories and the conservation of existing territories and considers how these debates operated both in Europe and in European overseas colonies. It analyses the writing of jurists as well as a plethora of practices that contemporaries pursued, which despite their obvious local reiterations, were mostly pan-European. Among other things, it covers the question of just war, taking possession of not yet occupied land, discovery, prescription, conservation of the status quo and the role of both conflicts and agreements, including agreements with indigenous peoples, natural law, the law of nations and of relations between territory and jurisdiction. To explain developments during the Renaissance, it observes a much longer time span that began in the Middle Ages and allowed for both slow and revolutionary transformations. It shows that developments in Europe were important, but as vital in both encouraging and empowering change was colonialism, which affected many peoples and territories across the world but also modified Europe in ways we have not yet completely understood.

This chapter is a survey of the legal languages used to govern territory, sovereignty and the right of a ruler within a polity. Debates were heavily dominated by feudal and private law-concepts. Sovereigns maintained the diversity of privileges in the territories ruled in the setting of a composite monarchy. Claims and titles could or could not entail consequences for sovereignty. Reservations and exceptions to full internal sovereignty were not uncommon. Succession quarrels (often causes of war), could be solved by treaty, often in conflict with domestic constitutional rules and principles. Mixed polities (Poland-Lithuania, Holy Roman Empire) offered a broad range of argumentative topoi to either confirm or combat overlordship. Internal German questions could quickly escalate to the field of the law of nations through the game of alliances and guarantees. Although republican forms of monarchy and republican oligarchies were on the decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their legal agency was not contested. In extra-European dominions of European sovereigns, the chain of reasoning was significantly lighter, as feudal arguments rarely came into play. Conversely, the agency of subaltern actors in establishing boundaries, or the treatment of native Americans as either allies or subjects provide original avenues of research.

The Court’s personal jurisdiction is governed by Article 34(1) of its Statute, limiting standing to states. Through an examination of the travaux preparatoires of this provision, it is revealed that while drafters considered granting individuals standing before the World Court, this was ultimately rejected due to reasons anchored in the traditional positivist doctrine. While scholars have long criticised Article 34(1) for being at odds with the role of the individual in the contemporary international legal order and called for its amendment, this chapter argues against this proposal due to the practical infeasibility with respect to Statute amendments, workload, jurisdiction, and legal interest. It argues instead that the Court may adjust its procedural mechanisms in a variety of contexts to circumvent its Article 34(1) and allow for the integration of concerned individuals in its proceedings to the best of its ability, where necessary or desirable.

This chapter discusses the judicial review of international decisions using the model of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It examines the jurisdiction, implementation, and monitoring of the Court’s judgments, highlighting its role in ensuring compliance with human rights standards. The chapter explores the procedures for reviewing and enforcing the Court’s decisions, the challenges in achieving compliance, and the impact of the Court’s jurisprudence on the development of international human rights law. It also highlights the importance of judicial review in promoting accountability and strengthening the protection of human rights.

This chapter explores the hybrid monitoring model of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. It discusses the Court’s jurisdiction, the mechanisms for monitoring compliance with its decisions, and the challenges faced in ensuring effective implementation of human rights rulings. The chapter examines the procedures for hybrid monitoring, the role of the Court and other stakeholders in the monitoring process, and the impact of hybrid monitoring on the protection of human rights. It also highlights the importance of innovative and flexible approaches to monitoring compliance with international human rights decisions.

Indians experience violence at twice the rate of any other racial group in the United States. Violence against Indian women is particularly severe; in fact, Congress stated the rate of violence against Indian women has become an “epidemic.” Aside from its prevalence, violence against Indians is unique because, unlike other racial groups, the majority of crimes committed against Indians are perpetrated by non-Indians. The high rate of crimes against Indians is attributable to Indian country’s peculiar jurisdictional rules. Most notably, tribes cannot prosecute non-Indians. This limitation is not a product of the 1700s or 1800s; rather, it is a result of the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. Oliphant has been widely critiqued in legal scholarship, but it remains the law. Jurisdictional limitations are compounded by Indian country’s geographic isolation, meaning tribes rely on law enforcement agents that are often located more than 100 miles away. Not only are state and federal law enforcement far away; they have little incentive to prioritize Indian country crime. Consequently, criminals have been known to target reservations.

Rather than occasions for law’s standstill in face of a political decision, emergencies are opportunities for legal, institutional and normative mobilization. The entry lays out the field’s basic areas of concern: the theoretical problem of containment of threats within a particular legal and political order, and the practical problems of definitions, authorizations, jurisdiction and temporality. If indeed the time frames of emergency are long and flexible, multiple and overlapping rather than “exceptional”, then law in emergencies is a constantly shifting space of opportunity in which normatively charged political projects can be manifested. To design legal and constitutional mechanisms that will better respond to threats, we should shift away from theories that perpetuate a static dichotomy between “norm” and “exception”, and study emergency as a dynamic field of legal and normative mobilization.

To function as nations, tribes require territorial jurisdiction. That is, tribes must be able to determine the rules governing their lands and apply the rules to all persons on their land. Much of Indian country’s land is held in trust, and trust status is blamed for many of tribes’ economic woes. Trust land should be replaced with tribal property rights regimes. That is, tribes themselves should be free to determine whether they would like to allow private property ownership. In addition to granting tribes greater authority over their land, tribes need jurisdiction over all persons on their land to function as nations. Land status – fee or trust – should be irrelevant to the equation as should Indian status. For example, outside of Indian country, police do not inquire into the citizenship of the parties prior to making an arrest. Though various rationales are offered to justify denying tribes jurisdiction over non-Indians, the reasons do not hold up to scrutiny. Furthermore, tribes’ lack of jurisdiction over non-Indians is indistinguishable from the long-refuted imperial doctrine of extraterritoriality.

The private sector is virtually nonexistent in Indian country. Consequently, reservations experience chronically high rates of unemployment and poverty. Tribes have implemented numerous laws to foster development; however, the private sector is yet to thrive. Legal uncertainty is a major reason why. Although tribes have the ability to make their own laws, the Supreme Court limits tribes’ ability to exercise jurisdiction over non-Indians. In 1981, the Supreme Court held tribes can exercise jurisdiction over non-Indians who enter a consensual relationship with the tribe or its citizens, and tribes can also assert jurisdiction over non-Indians engaged in behavior that imperils tribal welfare. These categories have been construed extremely narrowly. Furthermore, determining whether a transaction is subject to tribal jurisdiction often requires years of costly litigation. Another impediment to tribal economic development is state taxation because the Supreme Court permits states to tax Indian country commerce. This means tribes cannot collect taxes because this would result in dual taxation. Without tax revenue, tribes struggle to fund the infrastructure businesses need. Additionally, it is often unclear whether the state can regulate an activity in Indian country. As a result of these factors, businesses avoid Indian country.

The distinct prohibitions of torture and other forms of ill-treatment have crystallized as customary international law as the chapter discusses. In the specific case of torture, its prohibition is also a peremptory (jus cogens) norm of international law – a rule that is applicable in all circumstances and in any place. The chapter also discusses the geographical, material, personal, and temporal jurisdiction of the prohibitions of torture and other ill-treatment under international law more generally.

This chapter examines the foundations and evolution of papal legation in the Middle Ages. It frames the development of this ecclesiastical office in the context of burgeoning papal authority and its reception in Christian lands. And it posits the growth of legation as a natural and effective response to the Roman Curia’s administrative, bureaucratic, and legal needs.

The focus of EU lawmakers with regard to cryptoassets has been largely regulatory. Reflecting the fact that private law is predominantly under the control of the Member States, and without seeking to be comprehensive, Section 13 takes a comparative view on the private law topics most relevant to cryptoassets. It covers efforts to harmonise national private laws, refers to principles issued by UNIDROIT and the European Law Institute, and considers relevant MiCA provision with private law effects in mind. Section 13.2 covers property law, including the important rules of title and transfer when multiple parties have competing claims to the same cryptoasset. Section 13.3 addresses contract law, including “smart contracts”. Section 13.4 on company law discusses decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) and the prospect of collaboration on the blockchain constituting a partnership as the default legal form of business organisation. Section 13.5 covers tort law, before Section 13.6 provides an overview of the difficulties often faced with enforcement of claims related to cryptoassets. Section 13.7 concludes with a perspective on the prospects of a uniform private law for cryptoassets.

The navigational freedoms are unavoidably curtailed to some degree in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) as compared with the traditional high seas freedoms. One of the main reasons for this compromise was to accommodate coastal States’ sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the newly established maritime zone. Nevertheless, the limitation of the navigational freedoms by the coastal State can only be justified if they are made in accordance with the formula of the attribution of rights and freedoms in the EEZ and must be exercised in good faith and by giving due regard to the exercise of these freedoms and rights. It is noteworthy that coastal States have been able to utilise mechanisms developed by competent international organisations to adopt and implement some of these limitations through the rules of reference, particularly regarding the protection and preservation of the marine environment from international shipping. This chapter first identifies the scope of the preserved freedoms of navigation and overflight in the EEZ, then examines how they may have been affected by the exercise of a coastal State’s rights and jurisdiction, before discusses the remedies to address these impacts.

Modern slavery is an amalgam of legal concepts defined in international law united by a shared characteristic – they are all forms of unfree labour: one person deprives another person of their freedom for profit. The introduction explains how unfree labour involving migrant workers and supply chains is particularly troublesome for states to govern because these transnational vectors do not fit within the ‘default’ territorial format of legal jurisdiction and, thus, challenge traditional ideas of state sovereignty. It treats modern slavery laws, which combine international, national, and (sometimes) regional laws, as an example of transnational law and shows how, in this context, the nation state is but one among an assemblage of governance actors. It develops a multidimensional conception of jurisdiction to explore the transnational legal governance of unfree labour and to illustrate how modern slavery laws reconfigure traditional understandings of sovereignty.

The European Union adopted region-wide binding legal norms and a multifaceted legal approach to human trafficking. This chapter explains that the EU has competence (legal authority or jurisdiction) over human trafficking because trafficking is seen as a crime that moves across borders. By contrast, the EU needs another source of competence to tackle forced labour in supply chains. These different sources of competence over different drivers of unfree labour resulted in a proliferation of gendered governance strategies. Pushed by the Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, the EU incorporated the rights of trafficking victims. The chapter illustrates how victim’s rights were subsumed under the EU’s primary goal of hardening Member States’ borders against undesirable outsiders, exemplified by migrant sex workers. The EU also promoted a corporate sustainability due-diligence directive and a product ban targeting unfree labour in supply chains, thereby extending EU values beyond Member States’ borders.

The acceptance and codification of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) contribute immensely to the remarkable achievements of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as a packaged deal, and permeates many facets of the successful implementation of law of the sea today. The EEZ concept emerged predominantly to serve economic purposes in balance with preservation of traditional freedoms of the sea. On the doctrine of attribution of rights and freedoms, any matter reasonably connected with economic benefits will ground a derogation pro tanto from the traditional high seas freedoms, whereas the essential navigational and communications freedoms continue to operate to the extent that they are not incompatible with the EEZ. The compromised balance in the EEZ is re-ensured by the doctrine that guides the exercise of the rights and freedoms whereby States need to have due regard to one another. These two legal doctrines further guide the principles to resolve conflicts arising from the attribution of residual rights and the settlement of disputes among State parties. The application of these two legal doctrines has sufficient flexibility for States to maintain a dynamic balance on an ad hoc basis to accommodate the growing and changing needs of States.

This chapter identifies striking convergences between the juridical techniques used in migration control and under colonial rule. These include strategic manipulations of jurisdiction, a legal system based on racialized status categories, normalization of a state of exception, and racialized determinations of culpability. Border externalization and extraterritorialization, reconsidered alongside the colonial practice of manipulating jurisdiction, should be understood as a juridical tactic that aims to evade responsibility for the state violence wielded against racialized migrants. On the basis of a comparative analyses of colonial and migratory juridical regimes, the chapter underscores the key role that law plays in maintaining and justifying racial domination in these two different contexts. The juridical regime in both can be best described as one of “lawful lawlessness,” to borrow a phrase introduced by Austin Sarat and Nassar Hussain, as the lines between “lawful” and “lawless” increasingly blur when law is put in the service of racial domination. To examine this blurring, the chapter turns to the 2020 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, which condoned the Spanish pushback operations and blamed migrants from “sub-Saharan Africa” for their “culpable” conduct.