Transboundary Harm in International Law

This book reveals the many harms which flow across the ever-more porous sovereign borders of a globalising world. These harms expose weaknesses in the international legal regime built on sovereignty of nation states. Using the Trail Smelter Arbitration, one of the most cited cases in international environmental law, this book explores the changing nature of state responses to transboundary harm. Taking a critical approach, the book examines the arbitration’s influence on international law generally, and international environmental law specifically. In particular, the book explores whether there are lessons from Trail Smelter that are useful for resolving transboundary challenges confronting the international community. The book collects the commentary of a distinguished set of international law scholars who consider the history of the Trail Smelter arbitration, its significance for international environmental law, its broader relationship to international law, and its resonance in fields beyond the environment.

Author Biography

Rebecca M. Bratspies holds a B.A. in Biology from Wesleyan University and graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania Law School where she was elected to the Order of the Coif and awarded the Green Prize for Excellence in Torts. She served as a law clerk for the Hon. Judge C. Arlen Beam on the United States Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. She was named a 1994/95 Henry Luce Foundation Scholar, and spent a year in Taiwan working with the Ministries of Justice and Environment. Her scholarly research focuses on environmental regulatory regimes and she is particularly interested in the international dimensions of environmental regulation, and the role of non-state actors. Professor Bratspies has lectured and published widely on such topics as genetically modified organisms, environmental liability, and international fisheries. She currently holds an associate professorship of law at CUNY School of Law where she teaches environmental law, property and administrative law. While on the faculty at the University of Idaho College of Law, she co-founded, with Professor Russell Miller, the Annual Idaho International Law Symposium. The inaugural symposium gave rise to the present project. Raised in America’s Inland Northwest near the Columbia River (where the events on which the book is set took place), Russell Miller has degrees from Washington State University (B.A.); Duke University (J.D./M.A.); and Johann Wolfgang Goethe University – Frankfurt, Germany (LL.M.). He was the recipient of a 1999 Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship, during which he interned at the German Federal Constitutional Court and European Court of Human Rights. He is a frequent Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and Public International Law, Heidelberg, Germany. Professor Miller is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the German Law Journal (www.germanlawjournal.com). He is also the co-editor of the Annual of German & European Law (Berhahn Books) and the co-author of the forthcoming third edition of The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (Duke University Press). He has authored articles in the field of constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and public international law.