Editorial: In this issue [Vol. 21: No. 3]

The latest issue of the European Journal of International Law has recently been published. A Table of Contents is available here on EJIL’s website

This issue begins with a symposium on treaty interpretation. The principal EJIL 20th Anniversary symposia were extra-systemic: looking at the way international law deals with the use of force or certain aspects of globalization.  For this issue of Volume 21, we chose a different tack. The aim was to hold a workshop with an ‘introspective’ focus, honing in on the processes of international law as a legal discipline. The goal was to re-examine a classical topic. The issue of treaty interpretation or re-interpretation immediately presented as both important and interesting.  Thus, a lively workshop on this topic was held last November in Florence.

Our panel of authors included George Letsas, Leena Grover, Lucas Lixinski, Isabelle Van Damme and Riccardo Pavoni. Luigi Crema also submitted a fine paper on this topic, which we later added. After much dialogue and revision, we are pleased to publish our symposia, The Interpretation of Treaties – A Re-examination.

Next, we publish three articles under our occasional series, Critical Review of International Governance.  In our last issue, we published three articles in this series from authors hailing from Ethiopia, China and Malaysia.  In this issue, all of our ‘Critical Review’ authors call Europe home and focus respectively on European institutions.  As with our last iteration of this series, however, we suspect you will find that in critically confronting the operations of a specific ‘global’ institution, these authors provide important contributions to broader debates on global governance. Here at the EJIL we often find that it is the confrontation with the particular that gives us a better understanding of the whole. The first is an article by Juliet Chevalier-Watts on investigations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.  Next is an article by Frank Hoffmeister. The EJIL has long been interested in questions of state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts. Hoffmeister studies this issue through a new lens, examining how the European Union might bear responsibility for internationally wrongful acts, taking particular note of the International Law Commission’s draft articles on the attribution of responsibility to international organizations. Last we have an article by Anne-Sophie Tabau and Sandrine Maljean-Dubois that considers the relationship between the Kyoto Protocol System and the European Union.

We also publish in this issue a Review Essay by Sergio Dellavalle, which fleshes out the central arguments from a number of texts on the topic of global order.  All authors chosen by Dellavalle write within the universalist paradigm of international law.  This essay’s contribution is that it serves as an able guide to a number of recent distinctions within this mode of thought.

We conclude with a poem, Cosmos Assessed by Eric Stein.