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International law prohibits intervention in the domestic affairs of other states. But this prohibition, which is once again in the news in connection with the crisis in Venezuela, is now generally portrayed as either so strict that it precludes common elements offoreign policy like economic sanctions or so vague as to be meaningless. This Article seeks to restart what once was a thoughtful debate regarding nonintervention. It traces the negotiating history of the non-intervention norm in an effort to understand why some states have characterized it as clear in its stringency. And it unpacks the crucial concept of "coercion " to show that those states that see non-intervention as difficult to apply stand on solid ground. Throughout, the Article takes a broad, comparative approach, looking to analogies in domestic law and other areas of international law to try to explain how we got to where we are today. The Article concludes by applying the "rules" versus "standards " dichotomy to sketch a potential path forward--a reframing of the prohibition of intervention as more standard-like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk analysis--a coping mechanism for the uncertainties we see everywhere around us-- is on the rise, including at the international level. It now informs, for instance, the work of the Security Council and human rights law and practice. While the story of how risk analysis has inflected international environmental law is frequently told, there has been little attention paid to the way in which risk is increasingly relevant to other areas of international law, including through "due diligence" standards. This Article fills this gap, describing risk's propagation across different international legal fields. It also offers a taxonomy of the ways in which risk is relevant. This Article distinguishes, for instance, between the way risk sometimes authorizes the state to take an action and situations where the existence of risk obligates the state to react. Finally, this Article seeks to explain potential reasons for risk's rise and indicate some of the consequences thereof, both salutary (such as greater participation in international legal decision-making) and less so (such as greater horizontal fragmentation of international law). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil society, the United Nations, and others are subjecting the conduct of hostilities to increasing scrutiny. But they often lack access to internal targeting data and therefore frequently render legal judgments based on the effects of attacks or assertions that particular weapons or methods of combat are inherently unlawful. This Article analyzes the historical development of key provisions of international humanitarian law (IHL) within the framework of two perennial legal debates-that between rules and standards and that between objective and subjective tests. It argues that while targeting provisions have generally reflected a balance between those two dyads, the jurisprudence of the international criminal tribunals has made IHL more "standard-like." It further argues, however, that the contemporary desire for real-time moral and legal clarity is fueling a yearning for a more objective "rule-like" approach. This Article then uses the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks as a case study and offers specific recommendations for how we might adjust the way we think about that prohibition to respond to the current legal and political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]