CLE Workshop: Self-Determination for States: A Territorial Approach

The Murphy Institute's Center on Law and the Economy hosts workshops each semester featuring both Tulane and guest faculty in law, economics, and political science who present their latest research in regulation, civil rights, the criminal legal system, and other key issues in law and the economy. Hosted by Adam Feibelman, Director of the Center on Law and the Economy and Sumter D. Marks Professor of Law at Tulane Law School, CLE workshops are open to faculty, students, and the Tulane community.

Ingrid Brunk is a leading scholar of foreign relations, public international law and transnational litigation. She joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2007, was appointed director of the International Legal Studies Program in 2009 and was appointed director of the Branstetter Litigation & Dispute Resolution Program in 2018. She was named to the newly endowed Helen Strong Curry Chair in International Law in 2015 and has served as the Law School’s Associate Dean for Research and in other leadership positions at Vanderbilt. She holds the Tarkington Chair for Teaching Excellence.

Professor Brunk is currently co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law. She is a member of the American Law Institute and was named as a Reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. She has received numerous honors and fellowships, including the Morehead Scholarship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Fulbright Senior Scholar award, the German Chancellor's Fellowship, election to the German Society of International Law, election to the Order of the Coif, and many teaching awards. She clerked for Judge Jan E. DuBois in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and for Judge Jane Roth on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The Vanderbilt Law School Class of 2018 elected Brunk to give its commencement address. She is a contributing editor at Lawfare and a founding editor of the Transnational Litigation Blog.

INTRODUCTION:

The right to self-determination is an important building block of modern international law, especially for colonized and Indigenous peoples. The entire peoples of independent states are also generally understood as having a right to self-determination, but the justification for – and scope of – any such rights is unclear. Self-determination for the peoples of states was at one time variously understood as generating a right to democracy, the right to permanent sovereignty over natural resources as a means of promoting radical economic reform, and a right to be free from many forms of intervention by other states. Today, these ideas remain influential, but they have little salience as legal entitlements to self-determination for states.