International Law

The December issue of the Columbia Law Review is out, and two of its scholarly articles come from King Hall faculty: William S. Dodge and Christopher S. Elmendorf.

"The Uncondemned," a feature documentary about the first conviction of rape as a war crime, is showing at the Napa Valley Film Festival, which starts tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 12.  

I was invited to contribute an essay to TIME Magazine's "Ideas" section.

The result is this: "Borders Should Be Checkpoints - Not Roadblocks - to Migrants."

An excerpt:

Please note new date below.

Professor Karima Bennoune will deliver a guest lecture on February 10 in the Department of Middle East/South Asia Studies at UC Davis. The public lecture is titled, "Sidi Bouzid Blues and the Green Wave: Journeys through the Arab Spring and Fall."

Yale University Press has just published The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce. The book has been hailed as a "tour de force" by leading trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, a "must read" by Senator Chris Coons, and "engaging" and "important" by Ricardo Ramírez-Hernández, Chair of the Appellate Body, World Trade Organization.

The hardcover is available from Amazon here, as is a Kindle version.

Most scholarship on intellectual property considers this law from the standpoint of law and economics. Under this conventional wisdom, intellectual property is simply a tool for promoting innovative products, from iPods to R2D2. In this highly original book Madhavi Sunder calls for a richer understanding of intellectual property law’s effects on social and cultural life. Intellectual property does more than incentivize the production of more goods. This law fundamentally affects the ability of citizens to live a good life.

The United Nations 56th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 56) featured as its priority theme this year "the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges."  This focus on rural women is long overdue, given that rural women comprise a quarter of the world's population.  Further, women provide 43% of the world's agricultural labor, and they produce half of the world's food for direct consumption.

Should dictators fear, or welcome, the Internet?  I grapple with this question in a new essay, Jasmine Revolutions, forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review.  The draft of the paper is available here.

Here is the abstract for the paper:

With sovereign debt crises afflicting both the United States and Europe, it is more important than ever to understand what the rise of Asia means for the world.  In this article, I compare two visions of internationalism--Henry Luce's framework of an American Century with Rabindranath Tagore's vision of an international order.  The paper marks in my own way an homage to Tagore, whose 150th birth anniversary we mark this year.

Download here.

The abstract for the paper:

I am here in Washington, D.C., at the XVIIIth International Congress of Comparative Law.