In this Issue

This issue of EJIL offers another rich and varied menu of first-class international law scholarship. The issue opens with an important article by Bernard Hoekman and Petros Mavroidis, who make the case for reconsidering current WTO policy on plurilateral agreements. Weighing up their pros and cons, they conclude that such agreements offer an important mechanism, as an alternative to preferential trade agreements, for subsets of WTO members to move forward on issues of common concern. The second article in the issue, by Kirsty Gover, tackles the complexities of indigenous-state relationships in western liberal settler states, presenting a compelling theoretical analysis of the relationship between constitutional rights protection in those states and their obligations under on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Next, Ilias Bantekas sheds light on a fascinating and under-examined aspect of international legal history: the influence of Ottoman law as a source of general principles of law in post-Ottoman territories, specifically in relation to the international law of cession. Turning from imperial history to present-day global governance, Oren Perez’s innovative and carefully researched article examines the tensions arising from the hybrid political-legal and epistemic authority exercised by transnational regulatory scientific institutions. Finally, Stefan Talmon offers an acute analysis of the International Court of Justice’s methodology for determining the existence, content and scope of the rules of customary international law that it applies. Having distinguished the circumstances in which the Court applies both inductive and various forms of deductive reasoning, Talmon argues that in fact the main methodology employed by the Court is simple assertion.

The third annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law, held at Melbourne Law School in July 2014, once again attracted an exceptionally high calibre of scholarship, and we are delighted to publish three pieces that were originally presented at that event. In his article on internet freedom, Daniel Joyce draws on historical experience and contemporary debates to explore the argument that the internet may require human rights protection beyond freedom of expression. Ilias Plakokefalos examines the problem of over-determination in the law of state responsibility, suggesting that the growing complexity of inter-states relations necessitates a rethinking of the fundamentals of this area of law. And Guy Fiti Sinclair proposes a new analytic framework for understanding the growth of international organizations as intimately linked with the cultural processes of state formation, with both impelled by a dynamic of liberal reform that is at once internal and external to law.

Roaming Charges in this issue leaves today’s world, crossing generations and time to recall our intellectual heritage. We are publishing the title page of Hans Kelsen’s doctoral thesis, the subject of which may come as a surprise to many of our readers.

This issue sees the return of our regular series, Critical Review of International Governance, with an article by Sungjoon Cho and Thomas H. Lee on the problem of parallel adjudication of a single issue, by the same parties, but in different legal systems.

The Last Page features a poem in French by Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko entitled ‘Schizophrénie du droit international’.