Teaching International Criminal Law in Germany

Today marks the start of the second week of the Summer Session in International and Comparative Law in Giessen Germany.  Pictured at the top of this post is the “castle,” the building where my class in International Criminal Law meets.  Inside this charming old exterior are some of the modern and fully equipped classrooms of Justus Liebig University, although the Justus Liebig Law School itself is physically located elsewhere.

My International Criminal Law class has 34 students.  There are 15 students from Marquette University Law School, 4 students from the University of Wisconsin Law School, and 4 students from other U.S. law schools.  The remaining 11 students come from law schools around the world, including Germany, Ethiopia, Turkey, Luxembourg, South Africa, Norway, Greece and Brazil.

Giessen is a college town.  It is dominated by University buildings spread throughout the town, much like Madison, Wisconsin.  There are numerous outdoor beer gardens and cafes, and the local population seems to spend much of their time sitting outside and drinking either coffee or beer.  It seems appropriate that the word “Giessen” translates into english as “pouring.”

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Procedural Justice and International Dispute Resolution

As alternative dispute resolution continues to supplant trials within the United States, there has been a marked movement internationally towards greater reliance on formal adjudication to resolve disputes, especially in the areas of human rights violations and trade disputes.   Although the domestic and international trends seem in opposition to one another, Andrea Kupfer Schneider argues in a new article that the two trends are actually both responsive to demands for procedural justice.  Domestically, the flexibility of ADR gives litigants a greater sense of control over the process.  Internationally, formal adjudication gives small nations and otherwise-marginalized communities and individuals better opportunitities to make their voices heard. 

Andrea suggests that formal adjudication may be necessary to provide a sense of procedural justice in places where the rule of law is not well established.  However, within the United States and other nations where the rule of law is better established, ADR becomes a viable alternative. 

Although there seems to be an inevitable shift to consensual dispute resolution after formal adjudication mechanisms are set up, Andrea worries that this shift may sometimes happen too quickly, particularly with respect to human rights disputes — “consensual dispute resolution [may become] just another set of processes to be abused by those with power.”

This is just one dimension of the article, which contains many interesting reflections on the present and future of international dispute resolution.  Entitled “Bargaining in the Shadow of (International) Law: What the Normalization of Adjudication in International Governance Regimes Means for Dispute Resolution,” the article is available here on SSRN.  It was published at 41 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 789.  The abstract appears after the jump. 

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Can New Patent Rules Help to Reduce Biopiracy?

Endowed with extraordinary genetic diversity, the world’s tropical rainforests have produced the raw material for many highly profitable pharmaceuticals.  Yet, the nations in which the rainforests are located — many of which are among the poorest in the world — often realize little economic benefit.  “Bioprospectors” have traditionally had little difficulty operating outside the legal regulation of source nations.  And, once biological materials are transported to the developed world, they may be made the basis for legally enforceable patents there.  Then, adding insult to injury — or perhaps more accurately, injury to insult — the patents may impair the ability of source nations to use their own genetic resources.  To critics, this dynamic — often labeled “biopiracy” — calls to mind the long tradition of exploitative north-south relationships going back to colonial days. 

The Convention on Biological Diversity aims to strengthen the position of source nations by requiring bioprospectors to obtain prior informed consent before using materials from other nations.  However, the treaty has a weak enforcement mechanism, and the United States is not even a party to it.

Responding to the weaknesses of the CBD, 3L Laura Grebe has an interesting new proposal to incorporate the prior informed consent concept into U.S. patent law.  Her proposal is described and defended in a new paper on SSRN entitled “Requiring Genetic Source Disclosure in the United States.”  In essence, Laura would require patent applicants to disclose the origin of their genetic materials and whether they obtained prior informed consent from the source nations.  Among other things, she hopes that U.S. reforms along these lines would become a model for other nations.

The abstract to Laura’s paper appears after the jump. 

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