The United States and international law : five dimensions of support / Lucrecia Garcia Iommi and Richard W. Maass -- Enforcing territorial integrity : U.S. support for the prohibition of conquest in international law / Richard W. Maass -- The United States and the International Court of Justice : a century of unfulfilled promise / Charlotte Ku -- Between formalism and instrumentalism : The United States and international law governing the use of interstate force / Christian Henderson -- The United States and the nuclear nonproliferation regime : pushing the limits of the law / Jeffrey S. Lantis -- The United States and international trade law : a precarious relationship / Judith L. Goldstein and Christina Luise Toenshoff -- Human rights treaties in the United States : the case of CEDAW / Lisa Baldez -- The United States and the International Criminal Court : interests, American exceptionalism, and why the U.S. relationship with the ICC does not change / Lucrecia Garcia Iommi -- The double life of Uncle Sam : the United States and the international laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment / Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi -- Contemporary U.S. targeted killing : expanding the legal boundaries of warfare to facilitate state violence / Rebecca Sanders -- "Exceptional" leadership : the United States and the International Law of the Sea / James Harrison and Oliver Turner -- Leader or laggard? The United States and international environmental law / Pamela Chasek and David L. Downie -- The United States and cybersecurity due diligence : a continuing dialogue for international cyber norms / Scott J. Shackelford and Rachel D. Dockery -- Understanding U.S. support for international law / Richard W. Maass and Lucrecia Garcia Iommi.
Summary:
The United States spearheaded the creation of many international organizations and treaties after World War II and maintains a strong record of compliance across several issue areas, yet it also refuses to ratify major international conventions like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Why does the United States often seem to support international law in one way while neglecting or even violating it in another? The United States and International Law: Paradoxes of Support across Contemporary Issues analyzes the seemingly inconsistent U.S. relationship with international law by identifying five types of state support for international law: leadership, consent, internalization, compliance, and enforcement. Each follows different logics and entails unique costs and incentives. Accordingly, the fact that a state engages in one form of support does not presuppose that it will do so across the board. The contributors to this volume examine how and why the United States has engaged in each form of support across twelve issue areas that are central to twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. foreign policy: conquest, world courts, war, nuclear proliferation, trade, human rights, war crimes, torture, targeted killing, maritime law, the environment, and cybersecurity. In addition to offering rich substantive discussions of U.S. foreign policy in each of these areas, their findings reveal patterns across the U.S. relationship with international law that shed light on behavior that often seems paradoxical at best, hypocritical at worst. The results help us understand why the United States engages with international law as it does, the legacies of the Trump administration, and what we should expect from the United States under the Biden administration and beyond.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.