BOOKS
Guest Editor (Page)
My latest book, entitled Law Beyond the State: Dynamic Coordination, State Consent, and Binding International Law, (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines under what conditions international law is compatible with the sovereignty claims of constitutional democracies. Recent political events around the world have revealed renewed skepticism of processes that take politics beyond national boundaries, such as European or international law. This skepticism is not new and the most common form it takes is that international law actively undermines the authority of constitutional democracies by substituting its judgments for the judgment of self-governing political communities. My book shows that the reasons we have to defend the establishment of legal institutions are the same as inside and across political communities and that international law can be developed in a manner that is compatible with the authority of constitutional democracies.
Check out this symposium on the book in Volkerechtsblog (with Steven Ratner, Andreas Follesdal, Kristen Hessler, David Lefkowitz, Alain Zysset, Kostia Gorobets).
Podcasts:
My first book entitled Divided Sovereignty: International Institutions and the Limits of State Authority was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Divided Sovereignty explores new institutional solutions to the old question of how to constrain states when they commit severe abuses against their own citizens. I defend universal, principled limits on state authority based on jus cogens norms, a special category of norms in international law that prohibit violations of basic human rights.
Check out this Critical Dialogue in Perspectives on Politics, 14:1. 2016 along with Joan Cocks’s Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions, (NY: Bloomsbury, 2015).