A number of factors must be considered when reflecting on State responsibility and they are assessed in this chapter. First, what constitutes an internationally wrongful act for which a State may be responsible? Second, what conduct may be attributed to the State? Third, what reparation must a State make in the event it is held responsible for a wrongful act? Fourth, what defences might be available to a State that would preclude a finding of wrongfulness? Related issues such as diplomatic protection, nationality of claims, and the exhaustion of local remedies are also considered in this chapter.

Chapter 17 delves into one of the most challenging aspects of climate litigation: attributing climate change impacts to specific actors or actions. The author explores how courts and quasi-judicial bodies grapple with the scientific complexities of attribution. In particular, she analyses how these legal bodies assess and weigh the scientific evidence, navigate the inherent uncertainties, and determine the legal relevance of attribution findings in climate cases. Through a detailed review of key climate cases from around the world, the author uncovers a variety of approaches to the issue of attribution. These cases highlight the diverse legal strategies employed by litigants to establish the causal links necessary for liability and the evolving understanding of courts in grappling with scientific complexities. In distilling emerging best practice, the author identifies instances where courts have acknowledged the collective and cumulative nature of climate harms, accepted partial attribution as a basis for liability, and applied innovative legal doctrines to overcome attribution-related challenges.

If, at the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks also to the influential works of Triepel and Anzilotti, the law of state responsibility came to be regarded as a distinct field, it was only in the period between the two world wars that this area of international law became the object of an intense scientific debate. The present contribution aims to assess the development of the law of state responsibility until 1945 by focusing on the events that provided a major impulse for this development, on the attempt at codification, on the case law of international courts and tribunals, and on the new general theories developed by authors such as Strupp, Kelsen, Lauterpacht, Eagleton and Ago. While the contribution aims to deal comprehensively with the law of state responsibility and its development in the period under consideration, particular emphasis will be placed on three issues: the problems associated with attribution of wrongful conduct; the consequences of international responsibility, and in particular the debate over the role of sanctions against wrongful conduct – the early signs of the emergence of a multilateral dimension of state responsibility.

This chapter asks two questions, although it is the second which is crucial. You may be tempted to scratch your head: after all, the theme of this book is Our Changing Climate, and we have referred to the rise in atmospheric CO2 content over the past century, and the rise in temperature over the past 75 years, multiple times. So, aren’t these self-answering questions? No. Firstly, scientists do not stop at self-answering questions: they delve deeper. But the key reason is that global average surface temperature is only the most reported evidence of a changing climate. In this chapter we will dive into AR6 in order to find many more indicators of a changing climate. We will also interrogate our CMIP6 simulations to see if we really do understand the science behind such changes. That is to say, how much of the change(s) can we attribute to human actions?

This chapter reveals the gap between the legal assumption that corporations and governments are formally separated and the reality of deep interdependence between governments and corporations in colonial settings, analyzing how this situation provided private business corporations with the legal infrastructure they needed to leverage their position to thrive in the colonization of Africa. It then explores related doctrines of international law – —diplomatic protection, human rights, and investment protection – —as additional aspects of the the international legal infrastructure that protected corporate actors from responsibilities while granting them significant benefits as individual rights bearers. This chapter chronicles the lingering presence and influence of international law on the regulatory options available for corporations operating both within and outside state borders.

This Chapter focuses on governmental use of private military and security companies (PMSCs) to evade the law of state responsibility, using offering as a case study of Russia’s deployment of a shadowy corporation known as the Wagner Group as a case study. The cChapter then suggests ways in which we might rethink the law of state responsibility in order to respond to the increasing threat of this sort of hybrid warfare. Drawing from scholarship on global legal pluralism, the cChapter argues for a less formalist and more functionalist analysis of the law of state responsibility. I I n the context of hybrid war, formalist conceptions of the state allow governments such as Russia to skirt state responsibility solely because there may be no formal contract between Russia and a PMSC such as the Wagner Group. One possible response then is to reinterpret Article 8 of the Articles of State Responsibility so that it looks at the real functional ties between a state actor and a PMSC, along with the “governmentality” of the function the PMSC performs.

As state ownership of private firms grows, morphs, and globalizes, states increasingly channel their influence through the financialized markets. The ensuing merger of the state’s commercial and sovereign roles suggests that state ownership is, again, becoming a vector of sovereign authority. This chapter analyzes the international legal system that has developed around surging state ownership. It suggests that the legal construction of distinctive “shareholder identities” in international economic law plays a key role in this complex regulatory matrix. Specifically, the chapter focuses on how arbitral tribunals adjudicating claims arising from international investment treaties use attribution, a doctrine of customary international law, in creating, maintaining, and disciplining state shareholders. Arbitral tribunals use the analytical category of the state shareholder in order to delineate and construct state and company identities and to understand the economic, political, and legal implications of those identities in the the global economy. Accordingly, the interactions between substantive international economic law and the law of state responsibility form important, but underappreciated, elements of this constitutive process, which comes to affect the institutional design of state shareholding and disincentivize hands-on control over state-owned entities.

This volume offers a new point of entry into enduring questions about how the law conceives of states and firms. Because states and firms are fictitious constructs rather than products of evolutionary biology, the law dictates which acts should be attributed to each entity, and by which actors. Those legal decisions construct firms and states by attributing identity and consequences to them. As the volume shows, these legal decisions are often products of path dependence or conceptual metaphors like “personhood” that have expanded beyond their original uses. Focusing on attribution allows the volume to consider together an array of questions about artificial entities that are usually divided into doctrinal siloes. These include questions about attribution of international legal responsibility to states and state-owned entities, transnational attribution of liabilities to firms, and attribution of identity rights to corporations. Taken together, the book highlights the artificiality of doctrines that construct firms and states, and therefore their susceptibility to change.

This chapter explores how multiple corporate structures in multinational enterprises operating in developing countries, and in Africa in particular, make determinations of responsibility among the members of such corporate families difficult. Specifically, this chapter challenges the assumption that the end of colonial rule and the founding of African states threw off the economic subordination that characterized colonial-era corporate activity in Africa. The end of colonial rule was accompanied by a desire on the part of multinational corporations to re-legitimize their activities in service of the newly independent governments through Africanization, which involved hiring African directors and officers as well as establishing domestic subsidiaries with African directors and officers. These strategies, together with the indigenization policies of post-colonial governments, in part account for the emergence and proliferation of multiple corporate structures in post-colonial African countries. Those complex structures, in turn, facilitate opportunistic behavior by transnational elites and complicate attribution of responsibility in the context of taxes and other financial liabilities.

The doctrine of attribution in international law has been defined, in large part, by the International Law Commission’s (ILC) provisions on attribution of conduct in the Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA). It is uncontroversial to note that despite the influence of the ILC’s rules on attribution, the regime of international responsibility remains underdeveloped. In addition to being underinclusive, the rules of attribution in ARSIWA are beginning to appear outdated. The central question, therefore, is whether the rules of attribution in ARSIWA are flexible enough to accommodate two disparate trends. On the one hand, we have witnessed an outsourcing of public functions to private actors in areas such as immigration, prison management, and education, whereby privatization has reduced state control and, consequently, potential state responsibility. On the other hand, there is a marked centralization of power in SOEs, some of which are now playing a global role as investors. This chapter assesses whether the default rules on attribution are flexible enough to manage both ends of the spectrum of state activity, which will be a crucial issue for regulators going forward.

The second element of causal complexity consists in the presence of conjunctions. In this chapter, the analytic consequences for SMMR are detailed and solutions for containing these consequences are formulated. Those strategies consist in applying further SMMR principles and in selecting cases based on whether their selection adheres to those principles. Learning goals: - Understand the challenges for causal inference SMMR designs triggered by conjunctions - Learn about how additional principles guide case selection in causal inference SMMR designs in the presence of conjunctions - Distinguish between focal and complementary conjuncts - Get acquainted with ranks for cases and case pairs in causal inference SMMR designs and how those ranks reflect which SMMR principles are fulfilled and which ones are violated - Learn about INUS conditions that qualify as necessary for the outcome and the consequences this triggers for purposeful case selection in causal inference SMMR designs - Understand the reasons why increased complexity of QCA solution formulas in the form of conjunctions also increases the complexity of causal inference SMMR designs

In this chapter, Nicholas Tsagourias and Fiona Middleton examine the role of fact-finding in ascertaining the facts supporting cyber attribution claims. More specifically, it considers the modalities of fact-finding, discusses the challenges it is encountering in the context of cyber attribution, and assesses the proposed cyber attribution mechanisms. The chapter concludes by identifying certain key features a cyber attribution fact-finding mechanism should exhibit to perform its tasks effectively and contribute to the settlement of cyber attribution disputes.

The chapter examines the distinction between public and private cyberattacks and responses to them in domestic law (e.g. application of criminal law) and international law (e.g. self-defence and countermeasures). After describing the different purposes, nature, and effects of cyberattacks committed by public and private actors, it argues that the determination of whether a particular cyberattack is of a public or private nature should define how states respond to cybersecurity risks. It then argues that the existing domestic and international law frameworks regulating cyberattacks suffer from serious limitations and proposes a holistic approach for responding to cyberattacks, taking into account the difference between public and private cyberattacks.

In Chapter 6, we elaborate on the difficulties that may arise in perspective taking. These depend on individual, contextual, and textual variables. Among the individual factors are motivation, cognitive skills and capacities, and empathic dispositions. Variations in the situation and context, such as available information and feedback, can affect perspective taking. Specific difficulties include: the failure to identify relevant personal knowledge and experience, inconsistent and conflicting perspectives, problems reconciling a character’s perspective with the reader’s own evaluations, and/or the relationship of the reader’s cultural background to that of the character. Subtleties in the text, such as multiple perspectives, unreliable perspectives, and multiple perspective-taking targets, pose their own challenges.

The allocation of liability for environmental harm in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) is complicated by several factors relating to the nature of the activities undertaken and the nature of environmental harm itself. These include the range of actors involved in activities that may give rise to environmental harm, and features of cumulative environmental damage, arising over a course of time either out of a connected or unconnected set of activities involving multiple actors or from external natural causes. To address these issues, this chapter outlines legal approaches to causation and the challenges that complex causal pathways may present in ABNJ. It then discusses the general approach to allocating responsibility to states and international organizations under international law and national law, and the channeling of liability to operational entities which is the principal approach in sector-specific civil liability regimes. Finally, it explores the rules that structure the allocation of liability in relation to specific ABNJ regimes and activities.

This chapter begins by exploring the issue of Proverbs as wisdom literature and its context within that group of books, it looks at the distinctive forms and content of the book and at the various possible context(s) for different sections of the work. It also looks at the Solomonic attribution and at other attributions to different characters found in Proverbs and at questions of orality and literacy.