EJIL Vol. 25, Issue I: In this Issue

Even aside from the joint EJIL–I•CON Symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the seminal Van Gend en Loos decision, this issue offers a cornucopia of innovative scholarship on international law. We start by introducing a new rubric, EJIL: Keynote!, under which we intend to publish especially noteworthy conference presentations and other public addresses. In the first lecture to be published under this rubric, Sir Daniel Bethlehem argues that the traditional ‘geography of statehood’ is of decreasing importance in the face of new global flows  ̶  of information, capital, goods, services, and people. Combining the new rubric with the well-established EJIL: Debate! format, David S. Koller and Carl Landauer offer two Replies that will certainly stimulate further reflections on continuity and change in the relationship between geography and international law.

The two articles that follow demonstrate, once again, EJIL’s commitment to giving equal attention to both theoretical and doctrinal aspects of international law. Maria Aristodemou’s article applies the insights and techniques of Lacanian psychoanalysis to public international law itself, appraising the latter as a thoroughly neurotic discipline; animated, challenging and droll, this piece will be required reading for anyone interested in keeping pace with the cutting edge of international legal theory. Christopher Wadlow’s article, by contrast, addresses a series of relatively specific problems arising under the TRIPS Agreement, of a conceptual and doctrinal nature. We think both are excellent in their respective genres.

Following our symposium revisiting Van Gend en Loos, Roaming Charges returns to Moments of Dignity, with a photograph of a pre-wedding moment in Peking.

In a further entry under our EJIL: Debate! rubric, we have, as mentioned,  an article by Dia Anagnostou and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi which examines the domestic implementation of rulings by the European Court of Human Rights in nine states, concluding that the main obstacles to compliance can be found in domestic policy process, legal infrastructure, and institutional capacity. Eric Voeten’s Reply engages with Anagnostou and Mungiu-Pippidi on methodological grounds, showing how the application of more sophisticated statistical methods to a more extensive data-set might produce more nuanced substantive conclusions. Together, these two pieces indeed provide compelling evidence of the growing interest in—and potential insights to be gained from—empirical, numerical and statistical studies in international law.

In our occasional series, Critical Review of International Governance, Rosa Freedman tackles the controversy over the role of the United Nations in causing the recent cholera outbreak in Haiti, exploring whether a human rights-based challenge to the UN’s immunity may be mounted.

The Last Page in this issue presents a poem entitled Bhopal, by Keith Ekiss.