Brad R. Roth

About/Bio

Brad R. Roth is a Professor of Political Science and Law at Wayne State University in Detroit. He is the author of Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law (Oxford, 1999) and Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement (Oxford, 2011), and co-editor of Democratic Governance and International Law (with Gregory H. Fox, Cambridge, 2000), Supreme Law of the Land? Debating the Contemporary Effects of Treaties within the United States Legal System (with Gregory H. Fox & Paul R. Dubinsky, Cambridge, 2017), and Democracy and International Law (with Gregory H. Fox, Edward Elgar, 2020).

Recently Published

Form and Substance in the Debate over ‘International Law of Democracy’ Scholarship

I appreciate Akbar Rasulov’s foray into the complexities of the relationship between form and substance in international legal scholarship. I maintain, however, that his criticisms of the work of the “anti-ILD scholars” (such as myself) contain some unjustified leaps. Rasulov regards those of us who (for overlapping, though seldom identical, reasons) resisted the claims of…

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International Law’s Enemy Within: Buchan’s “International Community” as Rival to the Positive Legal Order

In a 2012 essay honoring the work of the late Pieter Kooijmans, I observed: “Going forward, institutions purporting to implement international legal norms face a fundamental dilemma: Will they construe international law as a framework for accommodation among bearers of diverse conceptions – both liberal and non-liberal – of internal public order, or will they construe it…

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Vidmar’s Democratic Statehood Thesis in Light of the Yugoslav Dissolution

Jure Vidmar’s Democratic Statehood in International Law is on the short list of recent works – along with James Crawford’s magisterial 2006 second edition of The Creation of States in International Law and Mikulas Fabry’s 2010 Recognizing States: International Society and the Establishment of New States Since 1776 – that provide up-to-date,…

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