Economic sanctions are a very important topic in the present international relations but also very common headlines in the daily news. At the present time, they become an increasingly prevalent measure for disciplining states’ unacceptable behaviour by a ban on trade and disruption of...

The dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization prides itself on its high degree of judicial independence and the impartiality of its adjudicators. Yet compared to other international tribunals, WTO members exert considerable political control over WTO adjudicators. Contestation...

The laws of territorial sovereignty are among the earliest to have been developed in modern international law, and are among the most important. While this would seem to indicate the potential attractiveness of normative economic analyses of the laws of territorial sovereignty, there is...

In the past few decades, economic analysis of law has been challenged by a growing body of experimental and empirical studies that attest to prevalent and systematic deviations from the assumptions of economic rationality. While these insights were initially perceived as antithetical to standard...

Theory about the relevance of soft law abounds; empirical research on the topic does not. This study begins to even out this imbalance by not only developing a number of conjectures based on institutional economics, but also by testing them empirically. Based on all 2,289 soft laws concluded by...

The proliferation of rules aimed at the management of cross-border insolvencies has not been coupled with sufficient attention to the choice of law rules relating to the avoidance of antecedent transactions as legal acts detrimental to all the creditors. This article is the first of its kind in...

This article posits that the creation and development of international regulatory regimes has so far required a choice between rulemaking and adjudication. Regulators that wish to make policy broadly and prospectively have done so informally and through rules. More elaborate and powerful...

There are various ways of understanding, interpreting and theorising international law. For instance, Kelsen founded a method of jurisprudence that was critical of ideology, the socalled “pure theory of law”. This is a method allowing jurists to engage with law as a subject of study in a...

Political Economy (PE) has been used in the national realm to understand political outcomes, including laws and jurisprudence applied to all substantive matters. PE identifies the interests of relevant actors as well as the characteristics of the institutions through which they pursue their...

Rational choice approaches to customary international law have gained in prominence in recent years. Although becoming increasingly sophisticated, they are not able to explain all phenomena of customary international law. This contribution claims that there are two different types of unwritten...