This chapter concludes the monograph, summarizing the main reflections offered throughout and reflecting on the future of the relationship between the individual and the International Court of Justice.

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 explores the conditions of admissibility for international human rights complaints. It examines the criteria related to the author of the complaint, the exhaustion of domestic remedies, time limits, substantiation, and the prohibition of international lis pendens and duplication of international actions. The chapter discusses the procedural requirements for bringing a complaint before international human rights bodies and the challenges in meeting these criteria. It also highlights the importance of admissibility conditions in ensuring the effectiveness and efficiency of international human rights mechanisms.

This chapter considers access to courts for victims of grand corruption, especially in Latin America. It explains the origins and meaning of victim compensation in the UNCAC, how “victim” is defined in human rights law, and uses the Honduran Gualcarque River case to introduce how courts are beginning to apply concepts from human rights law to cases involving victims of grand corruption. It divides these cases into “direct harm” suffered by individual or group victims, and cases involving broad or diffuse harm where victims as a class are represented by civil society organizations. It looks briefly at which civil society organizations should be able to represent victims in proceedings.

Modern interactions between humans and robots challenge our conceptions of self, privacy, and society, stretching the capacities of legal regimes to preserve autonomy, intimacy, and democratic governance. Where should we look for normative and legal guidance? One possibility in the US context is the Fourth Amendment. Unfortunately, rules governing “standing” and the state agency requirement limit the Amendment’s potential to protect core norms in these rapidly evolving contexts. This chapter argues that the text, history, and philosophical lineage of the Fourth Amendment favor a broader understanding of who can bring Fourth Amendment challenges and whose conduct should be subject to Fourth Amendment regulation. This reading dramatically enhances the Amendment’s role in efforts to understand, regulate, and protect human–robot interactions.

ERISA’s underdeveloped civil enforcement mechanism, section 502(a), has generated extensive litigation. Judicially crafted strictures on the relief available to participants have arisen with respect to standing, scope of judicial review, causes of action, and remedies. While the Supreme Court has held those with a colorable claim to benefits have standing, precisely what that means has proven elusive. Judicial review of denied claims is strictly constrained. Court access requires that participants have exhausted internal review processes, and if the plan grants the administrator discretion to determine eligibility for benefits or construe the plan’s terms (which is virtually always), judicial review is restricted to a cursory scan for abuse of discretion. Deferential review survives even if the administrator is conflicted: lower courts are instructed to consider the conflict merely as one factor in and overall assessment of whether discretion was abused. Finally, the Court has held that ERISA does not permit the full panoply of damages one would expect in the aftermath of contractual or fiduciary breach. Consequential damages are unavailable for denied claims, and equitable relief for fiduciary breach is limited to what was typically available in equity in the days of the divided bench.

Chapter 5 turns to a description of the array of common law and statutory defenses that defendants who are sued for public nuisance claims have used in response to litigation. The chapter surveys several conventional tort defenses to public nuisance claims such as lack of causation, lack of proximate causation, failure to define an injury to a common public right, lack of unreasonable interference with a public right, remoteness, lack of standing, economic loss rule, municipal recovery rule, compliance with regulatory rules and standards, federal preemption, federal displacement, the learned intermediary, third party intervention, unconstitutional vagueness, statutes of limitation, violation of the dormant Commerce Clause, and the Eleventh Amendment. In addition, defendants have argued that individual claimants have failed to satisfy the special injury rule that might entitle them to compensatory damages. The chapter evalutes judicial discussion of these defenses and notes cases in which courts have found several defenses to be inapplicable, or overcome by the plaintiffs factual pleadings.

Environmental harm in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) raises distinct issues of standing because of the collective nature of environmental interests in these areas, including who has the right (or obligation) to take the necessary response action to address environmental harm. Both international law and national law recognize that certain actors have sufficient legal interest to bring claims for environmental damage despite not directly suffering injury or loss. These developments reflect an increasing recognition of the intrinsic value of the environment and shifting conceptions of the environment as a collective good subjective to community interests. However, the parameters of the concepts that affirm collective interests in the protection of the environment are nebulous and the scenarios in which they would apply are likely to be contested. In considering the application of the rules of standing in ABNJ, this chapter explores trends in standing in relation to the environment under international law, civil liability regimes and national law before turning to how the specific regimes governing areas beyond national jurisdiction address the issue of standing.

This chapter on India suggests that the Indian Competition Act of 2002 already had the possibility to offer lenient treatment to a firm that reports the existence of a cartel. However, the details for offering lenient treatment were only elaborated for the first time in 2009, in the Lesser Penalty Regulation. A revision followed in 2017. This resulted in a mere thirteen decisions of the Competition Commission of India (CCI) supported by the leniency programme. This low number may be explained by the discretion the CCI has to judge leniency applications and the uncertainty leniency applicants face in relation to damages claims. The chapter recommends addressing these issues, but also increasing the incentives to apply for leniency by introducing individualised sanctions to directors or immunising successful leniency applicants from debarment from procurement projects. Another recommendation is to avoid creating other pitfalls when the Competition Act is being amended.

This chapter starts from a familiar question: is State responsibility in international law usefully understood on the model of domestic private law or on that of domestic criminal law or neither? It then discusses the attractions and limits of the model of private law. It then turns to ‘international crimes’ or ‘serious breach[es] of an obligation arising under a peremptory norm of general international law’ as defined in the International Law Commission's successive works and discusses the ways in which the provisions for such wrongs seem analogous or disanalogous to domestic criminal law. The next section takes up the suggestion that a distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ law is conceptually and practically preferable to that between ‘international crimes’ and ‘international delicts’: is this the best way to capture a category of international wrongs that merit a distinctive response? The final section asks whether State responsibility thus understood can usefully be seen as a species of ‘criminal’ responsibility and whether it offers domestic theorists a fruitful way of ‘deconstructing’ criminal law.

Chapter 11 covers issues relating to litigation. Part A first addresses the right of exclusive licensees of patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets to sue to enforce licensed IP against third party infringers, and the rules requiring licensors to be joined in such suits. The chapter next moves to contractual clauses that allocate responsibilty for litigation among the licensor and licensee (Ryan v. Graco). It next addresses contractual provisions relating to domestic and international choice of law and dispute resolution, including required arbitration and mediation (alternate dispute resolution). The shifting of fees and litigation expenses is covered next. The chapter concludes by considering special provisions germane to licenses that are entered into in settlement of litigation.

Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering.

Argued November 4, 1970.Decided July 4, 1971.

Case history: District Court judgment and 398 F.2d 398, vacated and remanded. [397 U.S. 159, 160]; appealed again on the merits. Justice Angela P. HARRIS delivered the opinion of the Court.

The Anglo-American legal tradition includes a civil tort known as false imprisonment, whereby one who acts intending to confine another without justification within fixed boundaries may be held liable, so long as the other is conscious of or harmed by the confinement. This cause of action is distinct from the criminal and constitutional law framework that governs the authority of the state to detain, investigate, or imprison. The false imprisonment tort encompasses such concerns regarding government overreach, but also extends to confinement that is wrongfully, i.e. “falsely,” imposed by non-governmental actors. This Chapter examines the evolution of the false imprisonment tort with a specific focus on the victim’s required showing of either subjective awareness of confinement or bodily harm. The bodily harm alternative acknowledges the basic wrongfulness of depriving actors of their liberty, irrespective of whether they are conscious of the confinement. Once recognized, however, the bodily harm alternative casts light on yet another possibility, in which an actor might be involuntarily confined but neither aware of nor harmed by the confinement. Such a case seems to slip through the cracks of the false imprisonment tort, but still gives pause when dwelled upon. To shed light on the false imprisonment tort and the particular case of the involuntary but unaware prisoner, this Chapter looks by analogy to the case of nonhuman animal confinement. Because nonhuman animals have often been presumed to lack consciousness, they may offer a useful vehicle for cataloguing the kinds of harms inflicted by confinement, not only in terms of demonstrable welfare impacts, but also in terms of foreclosed opportunities to thrive, loss of dignity, or other such less tangible but nontrivial impairments.

This chapter addresses the jurisdiction of the WTO dispute settlement system and examines the terms of reference of WTO panels. It discusses the jurisdiction ratione materiae and the jurisdiction ratione personae of WTO panels, including the concepts of the “measure” and “legal claims” that may be brought before WTO panels. The chapter examines how the concept of standing (locus standi) is applied in WTO dispute settlement. It also discusses the process for reviewing disputed issues regarding the jurisdiction/terms of reference of a panel. The chapter also discusses arbitration in the WTO dispute settlement system.

Justiciability doctrine also dealt with the amenability of states to suit in the federal courts, an issue the Court addressed in Monaco v. Mississippi, which found a general principle of state sovereign immunity embedded in the Constitution. The Court also continued to limn the controus of the law authotizing suits under limited circumstances against state officers charged with enforcing allegedly unconstitutional state laws. And, in an important and confusing decision the Court invoked standing and political questions rules to avoid deciding whether the proposed Child Labor Amendment had expired because of the lapse of time or asserted procedural irregularities in state ratification processes.

Felix Frankfurter invented the field of federal jurisdiction. It concerned the occasions for the proper exercise of federal judicial power under Article III. The Hughes Court endorsed the Declaratory Judgment Act as a mechanism for efficient dispute adjudication. And, though the Court did not follow his advice consistently, in Ashwander v. TVA Justice Brandeis developed a comprehensive list of rules that should limit the number of cases in which the federal courts exercised their power. Among those doctrines was a newly invigorated law of standing that, Brandeis and Frankfurter may have hoped, would have insulated New Deal legislation against constitutional challenge.

For the purposes of this Agreement, the term “domestic industry” shall be interpreted as referring to the domestic producers as a whole of the like products or to those of them whose collective output of the products constitutes a major proportion of the total domestic production of those products, except that: