In This Issue

As is customary in our final issue of the year, EJIL 36(4) opens with the Afterwords to the annual EJIL Foreword. Published in the first issue of this volume, this year’s Foreword was authored by Susan Marks and critically explored the metaphor of the world as a family and its implications for international law. In this issue, five authors engage with Marks’ exploration. Barney Afako defends the family metaphor’s continuing force, drawing on African contexts and intergenerational climate discourse to argue that the metaphor can sustain social cohesion and public goods. Building on Marks’ critique, Maria Aristodemou adopts a psychoanalytic lens to probe what understanding of the family underpins an international law that has failed so catastrophically to curb the violence in Gaza. Adom Getachew, in turn, draws on anti-colonial and post-colonial experiences to rethink dependence, care and inheritance, showing how slavery and colonialism have integrated the world in deeply hierarchical and unequal ways. Next, Diane Otto sketches emancipatory imaginaries of kinship that might loosen the hold of nationalistic and anthropocentric family forms. Finally, Umut Özsu returns to Marx and Engels to show that neither was an abolitionist of families as such, and to suggest that the future will likely bring families of various forms, emphasizing that legal and social forms admit both evolution and revolution.

The Articles section of this issue opens with Alice Pirlot’s socio-historical account of why international tax law has long been treated as outside international law. Pirlot traces this separation to 20th-century scholarly and professional choices that entrenched compartmentalized communities, and argues that recognizing these dynamics is a precondition for rebuilding dialogue between today’s international law and international tax law scholars – and, more broadly, for rethinking the disciplinary boundaries of international law.

In the next article, Robert Schütze revisits Martti Koskenniemi’s influential reading of Hersch Lauterpacht. On Schütze’s account, Koskenniemi casts Lauterpacht as a ‘backward-looking’ natural lawyer whose imagination remained anchored in a 19th-century framework. Against that portrait, Schütze returns to Lauterpacht’s writings to offer a different reconstruction: Lauterpacht as a utopian international federalist committed to supranational authority, an ambition that international law has only partially realized.

The section concludes with Andrew Chubb’s analysis of UNCLOS and China’s policy in the South China Sea. By tracing how PRC agencies have invoked and operationalized the Convention’s language of maritime rights while contesting its constraints, Chubb suggests that UNCLOS has not only structured legal argument but has also helped contribute to interstate maritime conflicts.

In our occasional The Theatre of International Law section, Damien Charlotin and Michael Waibel present a computational analysis of the Hague Academy’s flagship publication, the Collected Courses/Recueil des cours. They find, first, that the Academy has so far fallen short of its aspiration to represent all regions and legal traditions and, second, that the characteristics of the Collected Courses (including their length, language, and topics) have shifted over the Academy’s first century in response to political developments and changing policy priorities. This article joins Lianne Boer’s piece on commentaries on international law, published under the same rubric in EJIL 36(3), as one of two essays developed as part of the Consortium for the Study and Analysis of International Law Scholarship (SAILS) and published in EJIL. The two articles, and the SAILS project, are introduced in a guest editorial note in this issue by Kathleen Claussen and Sergio Puig.

In our Critical Review of Jurisprudence section, Jevgeniy Bluwstein examines the ECtHR’s KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland judgment. Bluwstein argues that the Court’s reliance on carbon budgets and a consumption-based approach to responsibility, alongside its silence on offsets and removals, exposes the contradictions of the global climate regime enshrined in the Paris Agreement.

In Roaming Charges, we feature a photograph entitled Generation Z.

The issue continues with a Symposium on International Environmental Law after Half a Century. In his introductory essay, Jorge Viñuales frames the symposium as an invitation to rethink the standard retrospective narrative of international environmental law, to confront the field’s difficulty in addressing humanity’s geological impact, and to reassess the role of international law in balancing development against environmental protection. The contribution by Edith Brown Weiss and Lydia Slobodian reflects on the structure of international environmental law in the Anthropocene and argues that it requires transformational change, diagnosing a set of deep structural disconnects, including the field’s anthropocentric and siloed legal architectures, its uneasy fit with scientific uncertainty, and the continued exclusion of marginalized and Indigenous communities from effective participation and remedies. Outi Penttilä and Martti Koskenniemi then offer a historical reconstruction of the rise of international environmental law between 1946 and 1993, tracing how the field took shape as a professional project marked by contested boundaries and tensions between environmental protection and development. The symposium concludes with an article by Jorge Viñuales that characterizes international environmental law as a ‘law of side effects’ structured to preserve production and consumption while regulating their environmental externalities, and argues that this asymmetry lies at the heart of the field’s contemporary limitations.

Finally, The Last Page features a poem by the 19th-century German author, Heinrich Heine.