Scholarship Update

I'm back from a brief blogging hiatus after finishing my grades, and summer is in full swing. Here's a quick update on what I have been doing in terms of research.

I have had a law review article and book review published this month. Both articles can be accessed via my faculty home page or my author page on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). You have to register to use SSRN, but the site is free.

The law review article is entitled Thinking Outside the Border: Homeland Security and the Forward Deployment of the U.S. Border, 44 Houston Law Review 189 (2007). In it, I discuss U.S. cargo security programs and their extraterritorial application. The book review is entitled Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Reconceptualizing State and Government Succession, 51 New York Law School Law Review 403 (2007). It is a review of Professor Tai-Heng Cheng’s new book, State Succession and Commercial Obligations, which addresses the disconnect between state practice and international law doctrine concerning state and government succession. Both pieces explore issues concerning global interdependency and interconnectedness that are central to my research.

In addition, I am currently hard at work on a new law review article on U.S. export controls, entitled Winning the Battle but Losing the War? Reflections on Extraterritorial Jurisdiction in U.S. Export Control Laws. The thesis of this article is that the United States' application of its export control laws to foreign reexports of U.S. origin goods and technology (something that is quite controversial legally and politically) is legally justified but strategically imperfect, and that changes therefore need to be made. While the extraterritoriality of U.S. export controls was debated at length by scholars in the 1980s and early 1990s (with most commentators opining that such jurisdiction was impermissible), there has been less focus on the subject in recent years. In light of the rapid and continued growth in international trade and the birth of e-commerce, as well as changes to the post-Cold War and post-9/11 national security landscape, this is a subject worth revisiting. (Note: for background information concerning U.S. export controls, see my 2004 law review article entitled E-Mails, Servers and Software: U.S. Export Controls for the Modern Era, 35 Georgetown Journal of International Law 320 (2004)).

Later this month, I will be presenting this article as a work-in-progress at the American Association of Law Schools’ Midyear Conference on International Law in Vancouver, Canada. The theme of the conference is "What is Wrong with the Way We Teach and Write International Law?" As Professor Mark Drumbl points out on Prawfsblawg, "[t]he conference is for folks teaching and writing in international law to rethink what we're doing, and equally for folks teaching and writing outside of international law (whether as legal academics or as academics outside law entirely) to engage with the subject and discuss what could be done better." The conference promises to be very interesting, and I am pleased to be one of its presenters.