Latest Book Recommendations

  1.

Book Title: Crisis narratives in international law

Edited by: Makane Moïse Mbengue and Jean D’Aspremont, ed. Brill, Nijhoff Law Specials, vol. 104, 2022

Presentation: This volume offers a series of short and highly self-reflective essays by leading international lawyers on the relation between international law and crises. It particularly shows that international law shapes the crises that it addresses as much as it is shaped by them. It critically evaluates the modes of intervention of international law in the problems of the world. Together these essays provide a unique stocktaking about the role, limits, and potential of international law as well as the worlds that are imagined through international lawyers’ vocabularies.

2.

Book Title: Drug Trafficking by Sea and Universal Justice (in Spanish language)

Edited by:Ruth Garcìa Llave, ed. Iustel, Madrid, 2019

Presentation:The international community, aware that the eradication of drug trafficking by sea is a collective responsibility of all States, coastal or not, and that to this end, coordinated action within the framework of international cooperation is necessary, has addressed the problem through two international instruments: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. The latter establishes a mechanism for boarding a foreign-flagged vessel on the high seas engaged in drug trafficking and provides that the exercise of jurisdiction by the State acting with respect to the facts is optional, so that each State party must regulate the competence of its judges to hear this type of crime in its domestic procedural law by virtue of the principle of universal justice. In the case of Spain, this principle is provided for in article 23.4 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary, the content of which has been substantially modified in the last decade through the reforms carried out in 2009 and 2014. Both of these eminently restrictive modifications, apart from representing a true metamorphosis of the original spirit of the principle, have progressively undermined the capacity of Spanish judges to hear this type of offences. In this context, this work analyses, from a historical and legal point of view, the national and international treatment of the crime of drug trafficking by sea and its relationship with the principle of universal justice. The procedural and technical effects caused by the different versions adopted by this principle and the solutions provided by the different Spanish jurisdictional bodies up to the present day.

3.

Book Title:International investment law through the prism of ethics (in French language)

Edited by:R. Maurel (ed.), LexisNexis, 2021, pp. 256

Presentation:International investment law is slowly but surely undergoing several concomitant developments, linked to unavoidable contemporary issues. Some of these are obvious: a greater consideration of human rights and the need to protect the environment, as well as a form of Europeanization. The first two movements tend to change the meaning of the investment itself, so that these social imperatives become part of the investment's purpose. In addition to taking these social demands into account, the EU, driven by public opinion firmly opposed to arbitration, is promoting the creation of a system for settling investment disputes in the form of a permanent jurisdiction. These three trends, which should guide the evolution of investment law in the short and medium term, can be linked to ethical considerations. Social ethics, environmental ethics and legitimization by ethics thus constitute possible analytical grids for the changes underway. The meteoric development of the digital or connected health market, as well as the breakthrough of environmental considerations and the demand for greater probity on the part of the arbitrator, are in any case phenomena that justify, as such, the initiation of a reflection on the way in which ethics irrigates, could and should irrigate not only investments, but also investment law. After attempting to identify the relationship between international investment law and ethics, several contributors begin by examining the capacity of the sources of investment law to make it more ethical: case law, treaties, investment codes and internal corporate standards, but also European Union sources. Other authors then propose thematic readings of investment law from the point of view of ethics in the pharmaceutical, sports, and digital fields, or with regard to the cross-cutting issues of sustainable development and the conditions (transparency, information) of ethical investment. Finally, a third part deals specifically with the ethics of investment litigation, with an opening to commercial litigation.

4.

Book Title:The sources of global administrative law (in French language)

Edited by:R. Maurel (ed.), LexisNexis, 2021, pp. 749

Presentation:The "Global administrative law” (GAL) emerged in the United States in the mid-2000s and is a research project that aims to observe and promote the development of administrative-type norms beyond the State: transparency of international decision-making processes, motivation of decisions, emergence of appeals, etc. The doctrine of the GAL starts from the postulate that classical international law, too stato-centric, does'nt allow for the analysis of these phenomena, and rejects in particular the notion of source of law. An analysis of the limits of the GAL has led to the emergence of a new notion of "droit administratif global" in French and in positive law, based on the observation of the activity of global entities and whose administrativity is defined by a functional criterion. The study then tested the hypothesis that these norms, procedures and standards respond to identifiable modes of formation. On the basis of institutional pluralism to understand the structure of the global administrative space, a theory of the formal sources of global administrative law is proposed. By enriching the presentation of its formal modes of creation with a systemic reflection on their functions and effects, it is finally possible to define global administrative law by its sources: it is the branch of international law aiming at legitimizing, by borrowing from administrative laws and in consideration of a principle of appearances, the global decision-making processes. This book, which constitutes as much a reflection on global law as on the contemporary modes of formation of international law, also confirms the relevance of certain classical tools of legal thought, such as legal orders and sources of law.

5.

Book Title:Fundamental notions of Spanish private international law: Approach to your study (in Spanish language)

Edited by:Marìa Teresa Alcolado Chico (ed.),Círculo Rojo SL, Almeria, 2022, pp. 252

Presentation:This book is not a true treatise on private international law. So far, the many and excellent that have been written deal with such important matter in the abstract and general sense of science, more modest the work that with natural distrust of the scarcity of my means I present to the public, is only a review of the international law in force in Spain (...). For those who need or like to deepen a certain subject, all books are few, and of course the one that only has a limited objective should not be enough. Ours is purely to preserve a picture of what is in force in Spain (...). I find nothing more difficult in any work of private international law than the method or order in which it is to be written. There are no two books of this kind that have followed the same plan, and I am sure that their authors have struggled with great doubts before starting their work (...), but in the case of private international law the difficulties rise in point, and the mood is perplexed without knowing what direction to follow, in (...) books that, like this, they do not have the pretension of profound work, nor of true study, but of practical work that presents at first sight what is necessary to solve a legal question, or of procedure, and if it is not wanted to be so much, at least that it prepares and leads to finding the necessary elements for that purpose». "Private international law in force in Spain by Don Emilio Bravo, President of the Chamber of the Supreme Court and Individual of the Commissions of Codes of the Peninsula and Ultramar.

6.

Book Title: Assessment of media development in Bosnia and Herzegovina: based on UNESCO's media development indicators.

Edited by:Anja Gengo, Enis Omerović, Kristina Cendric (ed.),UNESCO, 2019, pp. 139

For further details see:https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000371223.locale=en